17
Koje-do
No aspect of the Korean War was more grotesque than the manner in which the struggle was allowed to continue for a further sixteen months after the last substantial territorial obstacle to an armistice had been removed by negotiation in February 1952. From that date until the end in July 1953, on-the-line men endured the miseries of summer heat and winter cold, were maimed by mines and killed by napalm, small arms, and high explosives, while at Panmunjom the combatants wrangled around one bitterly contentious issue: the post-armistice exchange of prisoners.
Long after both sides had forsaken any hope of achieving decisive territorial gains on the battlefield, the impulse toward gaining a moral victory—or at least avoiding a moral defeat—persisted. In the matter of the prisoners, there were two vital objectives for the UN Command: first, to gain the return to freedom of every man of their own held by the Communists, and second, among Chinese and Korean prisoners held in the South, to ensure that only willing prisoners were returned to Communist hands. The memory of Yalta, of hundreds of thousands of doomed, desperate Russians being herded by the Western Allies back into the bloody maw of Stalin in 1945, hung heavy over the governments of the West.
The first list of prisoners in Communist hands handed over to the UN Command on December 18, 1951, contained just 11,559 names. Yet in March 1951, Peking and Pyongyang had claimed to be holding 65,000 captives. Even by Communist standards, this was a huge discrepancy. Apart from South Korean captives, it left more than 8,000 missing Americans unaccounted for. The Chinese claimed that thousands of ROK Army prisoners had been allowed to go home and that the unlisted foreigners had died, escaped, been killed in air raids or released at the front. But Peking can never have supposed that this explanation would be acceptable in South Korea or the United States.
Even more contentious and complex, however, was the fate of the Communist prisoners in UN hands. From the standpoint of Peking and Pyongyang, it was a matter of immense importance that all these should be seen to return to the bosom of the people’s republics. The propaganda cost of many thousands being seen to “choose freedom,” to decline repatriation, appeared intolerable. On April 2, 1952, the Communist delegation at Panmunjom demanded that the UN Command should prepare lists of prisoners willing to return north. To the astonishment of both delegations, only 70,000 of the total of 132,000 agreed to do so. There was no possibility that such a situation could be accepted by the Communist governments. A long, wretched struggle of wills began, in which the attention of the world became focused upon the vast UN prison compounds on the offshore islands of South Korea.
• • •
Until the war was well advanced, Koje-do remained one of the prettiest possessions of South Korea. A little fishing community a few miles across the sea from the port of Pusan, it had gone untroubled by most of the dramas and horrors that had befallen the mainland. Communist prisoners were shipped in batches to Pusan by truck or train. At a compound on the edge of the city, the bewildered and demoralized men spent an average of two days while joint American and South Korean CIC teams interrogated them. They were given old American-style fatigues to replace their tattered uniforms, segregated by rank and ethnic group, and housed in big tents from which they were brought forth, in their turn, to be questioned.
Millions of words have been written about the plight of UN prisoners in the hands of the Communists in Korea. Much less has been said about the treatment of Communist prisoners in the hands of the UN. Under the UN, nothing remotely resembling the indoctrination program carried out in the Yalu camps took place. It may justly be claimed that the North Korean and Chinese prisoners in the southern camps were confined, for the most part, in conditions little worse, and with more and better food, than many would have enjoyed at home. Yet amid the profound humanitarian concern for the British, Americans, Turks being maltreated in the North, little has been said about the casual brutality to which thousands of Communist prisoners were subjected. A host of UN veterans of Korea testify to the hostility and contempt in which most soldiers held “the gooks,” whether North or South Korean.
Western treatment of the Koreans and the Chinese was dictated by a deeply rooted conviction that these were not people like themselves, but near-animals who could be held at bay only by the use of the kind of brutality they were wont to employ against each other. At the front prisoners became better treated, indeed greatly valued for intelligence purposes, from the spring of 1951 onward. But in the camps of South Korea, many suffered as severely as their counterparts on the Yalu. “The compounds at Pusan were run by military police who were very rough on the prisoners, often beat them up very badly,” said Private Alan Maggio, who served among the POWs as a medical orderly for ten months from May 1951. “Those MPs were just waiting for trouble. They wanted something to happen. The enlisted men ran the system. There were no officers who bothered to walk round or check what was going on.”1
From the Pusan compounds the prisoners were herded into landing craft at the dockside and ferried for three hours across the sea to Koje-do. Here, beneath the shadow of the high hills that dominated the island, thirty-seven vast, adjoining, wired compounds had been constructed. Within these were confined, early in 1952, some 70,000 Chinese and North Korean prisoners. They were held at a density four times greater than that tolerated in U.S. federal penitentiaries. A further 100,000, including 38,000 born in South Korea and conscripted into the North Korean Army during the Communist occupation, had already been screened and removed from the island.
They drifted upon an unbroken swell of boredom. There were a few daily fatigue parties—the details marching out of the compounds each morning carrying great drums of excrement slung between poles, the men working on the drainage ditches in endless, hopeless attempts to clear the mud which overlay the entire camp. But most prisoners sat in their tents all day playing a Korean version of mah-jongg, carving wooden figures, reading, playing cards, cooking over their little fires. Within each compound the Americans left the prisoners entirely to themselves. But their lot was not enviable. From one of the little dispensaries outside the compound gates, Private Maggio found ample opportunities for exercising his medical skills:
“Koje-do wasn’t managed properly—there were far too many men in one enclosure. There was a lot of bronchitis, pneumonia, malaria, dysentery, pinkeye. TB was widespread. There were men with open wounds that were still draining. All of them had lice. The problem was washing their clothes—it should have been compulsory, but it wasn’t. The prisoners hated the delousing powder. Then there were always problems with the rats, which wasn’t helped by the way they all hid food under their mats. The Chinese prisoners had the cleanest compound and highest morale. They were by far the most disciplined group on that island.”2
The UN Command could claim that despite all the medical problems, only a very small number of Communist prisoners died from disease on Koje-do, by comparison with the terrible toll on the Yalu. But the eyewitness evidence is also overwhelming that conditions among the prisoners would have been considered barbaric by, say, the inmates of a POW camp in Germany in 1943. Their captors had simply installed the Chinese and North Koreans in the circumstances they considered appropriate to Asian peasants.
More serious than this was the rabble of the American and Korean armies who were entrusted with their custody. Maggio and other eyewitnesses describe the ferocious racial tensions between American groups among the guards—notably the blacks and Chicanos against the whites. For them, duty on Koje-do was almost as intolerable as for the prisoners. No serious attempt was made by officers to impose leadership or discipline. Gambling and local whores were the only diversions. Knife fights and brawls were commonplace. “The disciplinary situation was unbelievable,” said Maggio. “I found the whole place a living hell—I was in fear constantly. There were fights in the barracks, fights in the compounds. Anybody who couldn’t make it on the line was sent down to do duty on Koje-do. We ended up with the scum of the Army—the drunks, the drug addicts, the nutters, the deadbeats.” To his overwhelming relief, in February 1952 Maggio was able to gain a transfer to an ammunition trucking company.
Sergeant Robert Hoop was posted to the 595th Military Police Company on Koje-do in October 1951, after being wounded in combat for the second time, serving with the 15th Infantry. In five months on the island, he only once set foot inside the wire of a compound, escorting a medical orderly—“I was very scared every second I was in there. I just couldn’t wait to get out.”3 Hoop had constant disciplinary problems with his men—“getting mixed up with whores and getting drunk on duty.” In his sector of the camp, there were just three MP companies, American and South Korean, to control and guard some 24,000 prisoners. By the spring of 1952 it was debatable whose predicament was more wretched—that of the prisoners within the wire or the guards outside it.
The root of the huge difficulties that burst upon the UN prison camps in 1952 was that, once the prisoners had been sent to the rear areas and interrogated, their custody and welfare became very low priorities for the UN Command. The officers and men who were entrusted with running the camps were, for the most part, among the least impressive manpower in the U.S. and Korean armies. Many of the guards treated the prisoners as animals. The chief objective of their officers was to distance themselves as far as possible from the prisoners and leave them in their compounds to administer their own affairs. Thus it was that when, in the spring of 1952, the Communists began infiltrating men who deliberately allowed themselves to be taken prisoner, with orders to seize internal control of the POW compounds, they were able to do so without the slightest difficulty. An extraordinary storm broke upon Koje-do Island, of a kind never witnessed before in any military prison camp in history.
The officers responsible for Koje-do had plenty of warning of the impending furor. In the first months of the year there was growing evidence of ideological and military activity inside the compounds. Prisoners manufactured dummy rifles, uniform caps headed with bottle-top badges bearing the red star, flags, banners. Openly, by squads and companies, they began to drill inside the wire. Their commissars harangued them. The first evidence of ruthless internal discipline appeared: prisoners were badly beaten up, even murdered within the wire. Yet in the face of all this, their custodians did nothing. The inmates were left undisturbed. The prisoner’s leaders began to make increasingly strident demands for improved conditions: writing paper, better food, changed routines. They were probing, testing the will of the Americans. It was found wanting. One morning a crowd of prisoners began hurling cans of sardines and salmon back over the wire. The food was unsuitable, they proclaimed. They wanted fresh fish sent from Japan. The prisoners staged strikes in support of their demands. Their custodians, baffled, fearful of the wrath of this vast horde of apparent fanatics, desperate for tranquility at any price, sought earnestly to appease them. An extraordinary psychological situation developed, in which it was the prisoners behind the wire who held the initiative. Their captors danced impotently to their tune.
There were violent incidents as early as the summer of 1951. In June, after a prisoners’ attack on a UN work detail, seven men were killed and four wounded by ROK fire. In August there were demonstrations which ended with nine dead and twenty-five wounded on Koje-do, eight killed and twenty-two wounded at Pusan. Struggles in September caused twenty more deaths. In a more sinister development, on December 23 UN medical staff were unable to save the lives of ten prisoners fatally beaten by their fellow inmates. No serious attempt was made to seek or punish the murderers. The same night, in a mass demonstration in another compound, fourteen prisoners were killed and twenty-four injured.
In the first months of 1952 the tempo of violence on Koje-do rose sharply. In February the UN began its first attempts to screen the prisoners one by one, to determine who wished to be repatriated to North Korea and China. To the astonishment of the guards, the Communist leaders of the first compound they entered launched a headlong assault with steel pickets, spiked clubs, barbed-wire flails, and blackjacks. One American was killed—and seventy-five prisoners. On April 10, when American medical orderlies entered Compound 95 on a routine visit to remove a wounded man, a wave of screaming prisoners charged them. Koje-do’s commandant, Brigadier Francis T. Dodd, sent 100 unarmed ROKs into the compound to retrieve the prisoners. One ROK soldier simply disappeared in the ensuing struggle. He was never seen again. Eventually, the guards on the perimeter tried to give their men inside covering fire. An American officer and several ROKs were wounded. In another incident, prisoners staged a massed rush on a compound gate. An American officer and two men fought them off with a jeep-mounted .30-caliber machine gun. Three prisoners were killed and sixty wounded, along with four ROK guards.
Koje-do was becoming, as the Communists intended, a second front in the Korean War. Their purpose was to achieve a major propaganda victory—to project the United Nations as the brutal persecutors and murderers of their prisoners. To this end, the fanatics within the compound were able to inspire or intimidate thousands of their wretched fellow prisoners to hurl themselves, often under suicidal circumstances, upon the guns of their captors. Those responsible for the camps now faced the worst of all possible worlds. In their fear they made absurd concessions to the prisoners and allowed their leaders ludicrous liberty to create an ideological hell within the perimeter fence. But Koje-do was also becoming the focus of growing world controversy, as reports grew of the casualty lists in the island disturbances.
On May 7, 1952, a far more serious, indeed grotesque, episode took place. In the midst of preparations for fresh political screening of the prisoners in Compound 76, which housed 6,400 of the most fanatical prisoners, the commandant, Brigadier Dodd, went in to reason with them. At 3:15 in the afternoon, as he prepared to leave, a whistle was blown. There was a rush of North Koreans around him. He was seized by the Communists and held hostage. A sign painted on ponchos, obviously preprepared, was hoisted: WE CAPTURE DODD AS LONG AS OUR DEMAND WILL BE SOLVED HIS SAFETY IS SECURED, IF THERE HAPPEN BRUTAL ACT SUCH AS SHOOTING, HIS LIFE IS IN DANGER. The following day, with the compound now under siege by tanks, guards, and offshore gunboats, and the island under the temporary command of Dodd’s deputy, Colonel Craig, Dodd was allowed to communicate the POWs’ near-farcical demands: to be permitted to form an association, to be provided with office supplies and a telephone. From Tokyo, Ridgway instructed Van Fleet to take whatever measures were necessary to regain control. On May 9, Van Fleet arrived personally to investigate the situation. There were now some 15,000 heavily armed UN troops on the island, facing the mass of unarmed Communists behind the wire. On the night of the tenth, after negotiations, Dodd was released unharmed. But to the profound embarrassment of the Americans, it was found that he had signed a document which appeared to acknowledge a measure of justice in the prisoners’ case.
The Communists had scored a propaganda triumph, and focused the spotlight of foreign attention upon Koje-do. In the days that followed a procession of official and unofficial visitors descended upon the island, and without exception castigated the authorities for the collapse of control. The British Air Vice Marshal Bouchier reported on the lack of parades and roll calls, the open display of Communist flags and military drilling by prisoners: “In short, the Communist POWs in these compounds have held, and still hold, undisputed control within their own compounds.”4 Van Itterson, the Dutch representative to the UN Korean Commission, who was a former POW of the Japanese, declared, “The Americans have no idea how to treat Asiatic POWs. The fact that they still don’t act strongly enough causes an ever-increasing audaciousness of behaviour by the prisoners. It is clear that only drastic measures can help.”5
In the months that followed the Dodd seizure, far from improving, the situation appeared to deteriorate: 115 prisoners died in rioting between July 1951 and July 1952. American attempts to reassert authority generated only more unfavorable publicity. On June 9, 1952, Pravda reported gleefully that the Americans were employing gas chambers and torture, and forcibly preventing prisoners from expressing their wish to be repatriated. When General Mark Clark expressed his desire for token British and Canadian contingents to join the UN guard force on Koje-do, the British reluctantly complied, but the Canadian government agonized for days about whether it was willing to allow its troops to be associated with the unsavory situation on the island. Renewed Communist rioting was met with strong American repressive action, and scores more deaths. The Communist “journalist” Wilfred Burchett wrote in the Daily Worker, “Two hitherto unreported massacres of Korean and Chinese prisoners in the American compounds on Koje-do have now come to light. . . . The brutality used to make a prisoner agree not to return home is now clearly revealed.” Strained relations between London and Washington were worsened by the difficulty of gaining accurate reports about what was going on at Koje-do. The Washington Embassy minuted the Foreign Office, “I think this is just one more instance of the difficulty of getting detailed information in Washington about operations in Korea.”6
One of the most interesting outsider’s views of the Koje-do drama was presented in a report by Major D. R. Bancroft, the British commander of a company of the King’s Own Shropshire Light Infantry sent to the island on May 25, 1952. Within hours of their own arrival, the KSLI had “invaded” a compound and removed reserve food supplies, escape maps, and contraband which it was plain had been sold to the prisoners by ROK guards. An hour later two prisoners broke away from the compound and sought asylum with the British. They reported that the Communist commissars were furious at having lost face and had ordered that the prisoners must forcibly resist the next “invasion.” Bancroft was appalled to discover that each compound possessed its own blacksmith’s shop, in which prisoners could forge weapons, and that American supply vehicles were providing them with petrol with which to start their fires. Accidental discharges from the weapons of guards, causing death or serious injury, appeared commonplace. On June 10 some prisoners who sought refuge from the commissars were speared to death by the inmates under the eyes of the guards. American troops entered the compound to restore order, and a battle followed. The Americans’ “bearing and control was of the highest order,” reported Bancroft. “The fanaticism displayed by the prisoners was alarming. . . . Even when half the compound had been cleared and there were over 100 dead and wounded lying around, the commissars harangued the masses to greater endeavours.” On June 11 fifteen prisoners in one compound were murdered overnight by the commissars.
The British attempted a new approach in the compound under their control to contest the commissars’ supremacy. They ordered and supervised the election of prisoners’ leaders by secret ballot. Thereafter, when the compound misbehaved, the prisoners’ representatives were compelled to stand mute in the corner of the athletics field without food or water for up to twelve hours. The loss of face obviously caused them bitter pain. When the prisoners hoisted Communist flags in their compounds, the British tossed in tear-gas grenades until they were taken down. Matters began to improve generally on Koje-do with the appointment of a new commandant, General Boatner. It was considered a damning comment upon the situation that prevailed before his appointment that, within a few days of his arrival, every single member of the former commandant’s staff had been sacked and replaced. Efforts began to remove the 8,000 prostitutes who had taken up residence close by the compounds, for whose services so many sentries had been accustomed to abandon their posts.
But the problem of the attitude of the guards to the prisoners persisted. “All U.S. troops,” reported Major Bancroft, “were apt to regard the PWs as cattle, and treated them as such. They were offensive in speech and manner towards the prisoners, and handled them, including cripples who had been badly wounded, extremely roughly. When witnessing this tendency, I asked both officers and men if they expected similar treatment to be meted out to their PWs in North Korea. Their reply was invariably, ‘Well, these people are savages’; and on one occasion, ‘Congress has never ratified the Geneva Convention anyway.’
“It was quite clear that the leaders [of the prisoners] could whip up mass hysteria among the PWs. It is therefore essential to segregate the ardent Communist leaders as soon as they begin to make trouble. Their cruelty is beyond belief. Normal torture was to hang offenders to the ridgepoles of tents by their testicles, place water hoses in offenders’ mouths who were left to drown slowly, etc. As soon as it is known that atrocities are being committed, immediate action must be taken to release the victims. This was seldom done. The PWs organised the running of their camps extremely well. Morale was high under the most adverse conditions. Physical fitness through organised PT was compulsory. . . . I formed the opinion that the North Korean was more honest, more militant, cleaner and better-educated than the South Korean.”7
Major Bancroft’s extremely disturbing report was forwarded to the Foreign Office in August 1952. An official attached a minute to the text: “The report confirms other accounts we have had of the ‘Hate Asia’ attitude so freely displayed by Americans in the Far East. The harm which such behaviour does to our joint cause needs no emphasising. It seems to us that if the United States’ Joint Chiefs of Staff were to take practical measures of indoctrination, a good deal might be done towards improving the behaviour of the U.S. Armed forces.”8 If these remarks—intended only, of course, for internal Whitehall consumption—sound somewhat complacent and patronizing, the seriousness of the problem of U.S. attitudes to the prisoners on Koje-do is confirmed by American reports to Washington. A fatal combination of incompetence, lassitude, and casual brutality by their captors had enabled the Communists to gain a bloody triumph in their propaganda struggle.
From the summer of 1952 the Americans sought to regain control over their prisoners by dividing and relocating them among a number of offshore island camps. Yet the savage revolts continued. On December 14 some 3,600 of the 9,000 prisoners on Pongan-do fought a pitched battle with guards in which they advanced, arms locked together, hurling a barrage of rocks and missiles. Eighty-four prisoners died, and a further 120 were wounded before peace was restored. Public controversy persisted about the treatment of Communist POWs. “The United Nations refuse to return captives who would almost certainly be shot when they got home,” commented the London Daily Mail on December 18. “But the effect of this humanitarian policy will be weakened by continual shooting of prisoners, even in self-defence.” Yet how, in the face of the fanatical and murderous behavior of the commissars behind the wire, was control of the prisoners to be maintained? An International Red Cross delegate, Colonel Fred Bieri, reported from Koje-do:
“Many prisoners’ spokesmen have informed the delegate of their grave concern on the question of repatriation. According to their statements, it appears that there are North and South Koreans (both POW and Civilian Internees) who wish to return to North Korea, and North and South Koreans who desire to remain in South Korea. Many Chinese POWs desire to be sent to Formosa. Many men at present living in close contact with those of opposite political ideology are scared to express their real opinions; others have been forced by their comrades to make statements which are contrary to their wishes. Our delegate states that the effects of political pressure (from both sides) as applied to POWs by POWs themselves can be clearly observed. Most of the incidents which have occurred so far were actuated by purely political motives.”
Bieri and General Boatner discussed the seemingly intractable problem of Communist terrorization within the compounds: “The Commandant regretted these incidents, but explained how difficult it is to keep each tent under observation in complete darkness. These beatings, which, unfortunately, often cause deaths, happen quickly and are carried out by well-organized groups. Even should culprits be recognized by tent inmates, fear prevents eyewitnesses from giving evidence.”9
• • •
In the last months of the war, control was tenuously maintained among the Communist prisoners of the UN. But the Western powers had been dealt another bitter reminder that the conflict in Korea was being fought by new rules, far outside the historic experience of the democracies.
“I Shall Go to Korea”
By the summer of 1952 the weariness of the United Nations, and above all the United States, with the war in Korea was becoming intolerable. So, too, was the embarrassment of defending the excesses of President Syngman Rhee. In Tokyo, General Mark Clark, veteran of the World War II Italian campaign, had replaced Ridgway when the paratrooper departed for Europe to succeed General Dwight Eisenhower in command of the NATO armies. As the corrupt farce of a South Korean election loomed, Clark discussed by cable with Van Fleet at Eighth Army the possible implications of Rhee’s defeat, in the unlikely event that the people of South Korea were allowed to achieve such a verdict:
“In the remote possibility that President Rhee accepts defeat gracefully,” said Clark sardonically, “it is recommended that he should be urged to serve his country by making a worldwide lecture tour at UN expense to explain his country’s problems and needs.”
But if Rhee forcibly resisted ejection, the UN would face serious problems: “We do not have the troops to withstand a major Communist offensive, to retain uncontested control of the prisoners of war on Koje-do, and to handle major civil disturbances in our rear areas at the same time. Therefore, we must swallow our pride to a certain extent until Rhee, through his illegal and diabolical action, has catapulted us into a situation where positive action must be taken.”
In other words, the U.S. and UN must bitterly stomach almost any political excesses in Seoul. The military situation was causing equal dismay. “It appears that, within current capabilities (in the true sense) and existing policies, there are no military courses of action that will ensure a satisfactory conclusion to the Korean struggle,” the Assistant Chief of Staff (Plans) minuted on September 15, 1952.” The problem of Korea is essentially part of a larger problem in Asia having its genesis in the aggressive posture and actions of Communist China. The JCS recorded that the United States’ objectives, policies, and courses of action in Asia should be reviewed, in order to determine the extent to which the United States military resources should be committed to deter or repel Chinese Communist aggression.” 10
Here was a heart cry from the Pentagon to the Administration: What are we doing in Korea? How quickly can we get out? This private debate in the offices and corridors of Washington matched the great public one, fought out all that year, on the election platforms of the country.
In the early months of 1952 there was intense public debate on President Truman’s prospects of gaining a third term. Toward the end of 1950 his “favorable” ratings in the Gallup poll were running at 46 percent, the highest he ever achieved. For the remainder of his term electoral approval of his performance never rose above 32 percent, and sometimes fell as low as 23 percent. On March 29, 1952, Truman chose the annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner at Washington National Guard Armory to announce that he would not run for reelection. He always claimed thereafter that he made his decision because he believed two terms enough for any President and that he could have retained the White House had he chosen to fight. This was unlikely, above all when it became apparent that his Republican opponent would be America’s most celebrated living soldier, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Early in April, Eisenhower asked to be relieved of his military duties as NATO’s first commander because of his “surprising development as a political figure.” For most of that year Eisenhower sought to create the impression that he had somehow been drafted by popular acclaim rather than made a conscious and ambitious decision to run. Likewise, he did his utmost to avoid explicit statements of political policy or intention. He was just Ike, and he believed that he could be elected for what he was, not for what he promised. He was almost right. Adlai Stevenson, the Illinois governor whom Truman had selected to succeed him, could not unite even his own Democratic Party behind him, far less the nation. Eisenhower, with his great grin and good-natured professions of pious intention, his prudent equivocation about McCarthyism, and his invulnerable status as a national hero, was unstoppable. Pathetically, Douglas MacArthur still cherished hopes of the GOP nomination. At the convention he received just 10 votes. Ike won on the first ballot, by 595 votes to Taft’s 500.
It would be wrong to suggest that the pursuit of an escape route from the war dominated the 1952 U.S. Presidential election campaign. Indeed, by that year one of the foremost grievances of the men freezing or sweltering on the line was that so many of their own countrymen appeared to have forgotten that they were there. But weariness with Korea played its part, not only in the political decline of Harry Truman, but in the election of Dwight Eisenhower. Korea was one of the “four Cs,” alongside Corruption, Crime, and Communism. The last glories of the New Deal had vanished in a welter of seedy Administration corruption scandals. Few Americans, few Westerners, any longer drew sustenance from a sense of high purpose in Korea. The cause was now tarnished by so many of the stains and blemishes that would assert themselves again in Indochina a generation later: the inglorious nature of a struggle that denied the promise of military success; the embarrassment of fighting for a regime whose corruption and incompetence were bywords; the difficulty of welding the South Korean Army into a fighting force capable of meeting the Chinese on anything like equal terms; the reluctance of America’s allies to shoulder anything resembling a just share of the burden. Before Vietnam was ever heard of, Americans discovered in Korea an unprecedented frustration of national will.
Despite the honorable character of both candidates, America’s 1952 presidential campaign was one of the most distasteful of modern times, dominated by the shadow of McCarthyism and the anti-Communist crusade. MacArthur’s objections to Eisenhower were partly founded upon the belief that Ike was insufficiently zealous in his hostility to communism, at home and abroad. Yet, paradoxically, few American conservatives cried out for a more vigorous military policy in Korea, the one battlefield on which communism was being confronted at gunpoint. McCarthy and his acolytes declared that American blood was being wasted in a struggle that the Administration was conducting without conviction. Their isolationism mitigated against any display of enthusiasm for an increased American commitment to a campaign in Asia. Like most of their fellow countrymen, they wanted to see America out of Korea. They sought only an escape without intolerable loss of face.
John Foster Dulles, the architect of Eisenhower’s foreign policy for much of his election campaign and presidency, believed that Truman’s decision to intervene in Korea had been “courageous, righteous, and in the national interest.” But Dulles also considered that the broader Truman-Acheson strategy of containment of the Soviet Union by limited action and reaction had enabled the Russians to choose where, when, and how to confront the United States. Dulles wished to see America’s military and foreign policy organized in a fashion that would enable the country to deploy its full might. He was the creator of the concept of “massive retaliation,” which somewhat troubled Eisenhower. Dulles proposed to keep the Soviet Union in a condition of permanent uncertainty and apprehension about where and when the United States would meet Communist aggression with unbridled atomic retaliation. As a corollary of this policy, it was no longer in America’s interest to become bogged down in limited local wars on distant battlefields against Soviet surrogates. Dulles favored disengagement from Korea.
Eisenhower’s early campaign statements on Korea were marked not merely by vagueness but foolishness. In one speech in August he claimed that the Administration had committed itself to the serious error of withdrawing U.S. troops from Korea in 1949 “despite menacing signs from the North.”11 In reality, of course, Eisenhower himself had been a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who advised the Administration in September 1947 that the United States had “little strategic interest” in maintaining a military presence in Korea. Truman was disgusted by Eisenhower’s posture. He and the Democrats continued to demand insistently that Eisenhower should declare precisely what, if elected, he proposed to do about the war.
Truman’s question was answered by Emmet John Hughes, a Life magazine editor who had become a speechwriter for Eisenhower, and Herbert Brownell, his campaign manager. In a long discussion over dinner in Brownell’s New York apartment, the two men groped for a decisive declaration that their candidate could make, that would yet commit him to nothing. It was Hughes who seized upon the idea that Eisenhower should promise to go to Korea and make a personal assessment of the war. He and Brownell then distilled a single, simple, short phrase for Ike: “I shall go to Korea.” The candidate himself proved uneasy about the idea, and the speech that was built for him around it. But on October 24 in Detroit, despite the doubts of some of his advisers, he took the plunge. In a speech at the Masonic Temple that was broadcast on nationwide television, he concluded with the declaration that his first priority upon taking office as President would be to bring an end to the war in Korea: “That job requires a personal trip to Korea. I shall make that trip. Only in that way could I learn best how to serve the American people in the cause of peace. I shall go to Korea.”
The phrase passed into the textbooks of American politics, for it set the seal upon Eisenhower’s victorious campaign. Two weeks later he was elected President of the United States by 33,936,234 votes to 27,314,992. On November 29, 1952, he fulfilled his pledge. Under conditions of deep secrecy, his absence from New York concealed by an elaborate cover plan involving a procession of distinguished visitors to his empty apartment, Eisenhower flew to Korea.
The President-elect spent three days in the country. He visited a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital and talked to wounded men. He traveled to within earshot of artillery fire in the forward area and inspected some troops. He passed an hour with a bitter and suspicious Syngman Rhee. He spent most of his time in the country with General Mark Clark. He saw General James Van Fleet, commanding the Eighth Army. He gave a press conference at which he conceded the unlikelihood of achieving “a positive and definite victory without possibly running the grave risk of enlarging the war.” But he declared that America “will see it through.” Then he flew home to New York.
The gesture had been made. That it was no more than a gesture was made evident by the subsequent testimony of Clark and Van Fleet, who had expected to take part in protracted debate about military options, only to discover that Eisenhower’s mind was fixed upon the best means of achieving a truce. The exalted visitor had flown from Seoul to Wake Island, where he joined John Foster Dulles and other prominent advisers for a three-day cruise to Hawaii on the cruiser Helena. The world believed that the voyage was spent in intensive debate about Korea. In reality, however, it seems that little of substance was discussed. The new Administration’s objective for Korea was already set: cease-fire. All that remained to be decided was how the Communists could be persuaded to accede.
MacArthur was among the foremost to propose a solution. While Eisenhower was still at sea, he announced publicly that he had his own plan for ending the war when the new President was willing to hear it. On December 17 the two generals met at Dulles’s home. MacArthur presented Eisenhower with a lengthy memorandum. He argued that the United States should demand from the Soviet Union the unification of Korea—and Germany. Their neutrality would be guaranteed by the two superpowers. Failing Moscow’s agreement, “it would be our intention to clear North Korea of enemy forces. This could be accomplished through the atomic bombing of enemy military concentrations and installations in North Korea and the sowing of fields of suitable radioactive materials, the by-product of atomic manufacture, to close major lines of enemy supply and communications leading south from the Yalu, with simultaneous landings on both coasts of Korea.”
It was a sad postscript to a great military career, this spectacle of an aged warrior casting his Jovian thunderbolts into oblivion. “General,” said Eisenhower carefully, “this is something of a new thing. I’ll have to look at the understanding between ourselves and our allies, on the prosecution of this war, because if we’re going to bomb bases on the other side of the Yalu, if we’re going to extend the war we have to make sure we’re not offending the whole . . . free world or breaking faith.” MacArthur went away home empty-handed. Two weeks later Truman departed from office filled with distaste for both generals, Eisenhower perhaps most of all. Ike, Truman considered, knew better. Ike, who had sought to pretend that an inconclusive settlement in Korea could be avoided, was in reality entirely committed to bringing this about.
The first plank of the new Administration’s Korean policy was a dramatic expansion of the ROK Army to a strength of some 655,000 men, at an estimated cost of $1 billion a year. Thus, it was hoped, the principal military burden of the war could be transferred from the United States to the Korean people. “Koreanization” possessed precisely the same shortcomings as “Vietnamization” twenty years later. While the ROK Army was a greatly improved fighting force since its lowest ebb in 1950–51, all the evidence on the battlefield continued to suggest that Korean formations were incapable of meeting their Chinese opponents on equal terms. But, unlike Vietnamization, Koreanization would not be put to a decisive military test. The expansion program began in the spring of 1953.
A development of much more direct impact upon the Korean peace negotiations was America’s test detonation, in January, of the first nuclear device of a size capable of adaptation for artillery—a tactical atomic weapon. The Joint Chiefs of Staff recognized its relevance to the Korean stalemate in a study issued on March 27:
“The efficacy of atomic weapons in achieving greater results at less cost of effort in furtherance of U.S. objectives in connection with Korea point to the desirability of reevaluating the policy which now restricts the use of atomic weapons in the Far East. . . .
“In view of the extensive implications of developing an effective conventional capability in the Far East, the timely use of atomic weapons should be considered against military targets affecting operations in Korea, and operationally planned as an adjunct to any possible military course of action involving direct action against Communist China and Manchuria.”
On May 19, the Joint Chiefs recommended direct air and naval operations against China and Manchuria, including the use of nuclear weapons. There should be no gradual escalation of force, they argued, but a dramatic surprise attack. The next day the National Security Council endorsed the JCS recommendation.
Dulles, the Secretary of State, was visiting India. He told her Prime Minister, Nehru, that a warning should be conveyed to Chou En Lai: if peace was not speedily attained at Panmunjom, the United States would begin to bomb north of the Yalu. The Pentagon had recently carried out successful tests of atomic artillery shells. The implication was plain. So, too, was the significance of Eisenhower’s public announcement that the Seventh Fleet would no longer be committed to preventing military operations between Formosa and the mainland of China. Nationalist guerrillas, armed and trained by the CIA, embarked upon an intensified program of raids against the mainland, more than 200 in the first five months of 1953, according to Peking.
It will never be certain how close the United States came to employing nuclear weapons against China in the spring and summer of 1953, or how far the JCS study and the Dulles warning were intended as bluffs. If such they were, there is no doubt of their success. Through its agents in the United States and Europe, Moscow was undoubtedly informed of American progress on tactical nuclear weapons and Washington’s change of policy toward active consideration of their use. The Russians feared Dulles and were disposed to believe that he meant business. There was a new confidence about American policy. In 1950 the uncertainty within the Administration was profoundly influenced by its perception of its own military vulnerability. By 1953 the rearmament program was well advanced; aircraft production was at a postwar high; the United States felt less afraid of the Russians, more assured of its own ability to confront them. Eisenhower said after his return from Korea, “We face an enemy whom we cannot hope to impress by words, however eloquent, but only by deeds—executed under circumstances of our own choosing.”12 At a National Security Council meeting early in February, Dulles spoke of the need to make the idea of nuclear weapons more acceptable. He “discussed the moral problem, and the inhibition on the use of the atomic bomb, and Soviet success to date in setting atomic weapons apart from all other weapons as being in a special category. It was his opinion that we should try to break down this distinction.” At the same meeting Eisenhower suggested the Kaesong area of North Korea as an appropriate demonstration ground for a tactical nuclear bomb—it “provided a good target for this type of weapon.”13 By March, Eisenhower and Dulles were “in complete agreement that somehow or other the tabu which surrounds the use of atomic weapons would have to be destroyed.”14 At a special NSC meeting in March, Eisenhower said that although “there were not many good tactical targets . . . he felt it would be worth the cost” if a major victory could be gained in Korea.15
Here then is clear evidence that Eisenhower and his senior advisers talked with considerable open-mindedness about the possible use of nuclear weapons in Korea. Yet today it remains difficult to believe that, had the military situation in Korea remained unchanged, Eisenhower would have authorized their employment. It is entirely probable that he would have done so had the Chinese offered some new and dangerous military provocation. But if America had detonated a nuclear weapon in cold blood, at a time of military stalemate on the battlefield, Eisenhower would have faced the certain, bitter, lasting anger and hostility of America’s allies around the world. He was a cautious, humane man. It seems unlikely that he would have taken so drastic a step.
But in the spring of 1953 the Russians and Chinese almost certainly allowed themselves to be persuaded that the new Administration was willing to use nuclear weapons if the United States was denied an honorable escape from Korea. After so many months of deadlock, the talks at Panmunjom suddenly began to move with remarkable speed.
The Last Act
For almost two years it had been apparent that the Korean War could not be settled on any terms that provided for the reunification of the country, nor which dispossessed either client regime in north or south. In the interminable struggle in which each side labored for face, the fate of the prisoners held at the two extremities of the Korean peninsula remained the dominant issue. The prisoners. It always came back to the prisoners. They were no longer even prisoners of war, in any historic sense. Each side’s captives had become hostages whose treatment and disposal became the focal point of ruthless bargaining in those last, sterile months of the Korean War.
In December 1952, when the Red Cross in Geneva urged the exchange of sick and wounded prisoners in Korea as a “gesture for peace,” Mark Clark warmly welcomed the proposal, but the Soviets and Chinese firmly rejected it. But on March 28, without warning, Kim Il Sung and Marshal Peng not only announced their acceptance of the swap but also declared that this should pave the way to a settlement of the future of all POWs and a cease-fire “for which people throughout are longing.” Chou En Lai endorsed this commitment in a Peking radio broadcast on March 30. Though he restated Chinese rejection of any exchange which left any Chinese or North Korean prisoner in UN hands, he now proposed that any prisoner whose will was in doubt should be placed in the hands of a neutral state for further investigation. For the Soviets, on April 1, Foreign Minister Molotov endorsed Chou’s proposal and offered Moscow’s support in seeing it carried out.
Washington at first regarded the Chinese declaration with deep suspicion. Again and again over the past two years an apparently straightforward proposal from Peking had proved, on closer inspection, to be capable of such different interpretation as to be worthless. Yet on April 11, at Panmunjom, the liaison officers at the conference table were astonished to reach rapid agreement with the Communists for “Operation Little Switch”: 700 Chinese and 5,100 Koreans were to be sent north; 450 Korean and 150 non-Korean soldiers were to come south. Between April 20 and May 3, the exchange was completed at Panmunjom.
A new wave of revulsion for the Communist conduct of war swept the West when the world beheld the condition of the UN prisoners who were released. In addition to wounds and disabilities that had effectively gone untreated for months, even years, many men were corroded by prolonged starvation or psychologically crippled. Yet negotiations for the next exchange began at once, and the full UN and Communist delegations met at Panmunjom on April 26 for the first time in six months. The main point at issue was the selection of a neutral “quarantine nation” where prisoners refusing repatriation should be held. The UN opened by proposing Switzerland, with no man to be held in quarantine for more than two months. The Chinese rejected Switzerland and demanded six months. Pressed for an alternative neutral site, they named Pakistan. Then the Communist delegates appeared to undergo a sudden change of heart. They no longer insisted that the prisoners’ political screening process should take place outside Korea, cut the proposed period from six months to four, and demanded the creation of a Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission made up of Poland, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, and India.
The Americans were at last convinced that the Communists genuinely sought peace. Stalin was dead, and in the dark shadows of the Kremlin new forces, albeit no less hostile to the West, were setting policy. Perversely, at this moment Dulles experienced a twinge of doubt about the wisdom of making a Korean peace based upon the status quo on the battlefield. Korea was the only shooting war that the United States was conducting with the Communists anywhere in the world. Was she now sacrificing a unique opportunity militarily to humble the enemy before the world? “I don’t think we can get much out of a Korean settlement until we have shown—before all Asia—our clear superiority by giving the Chinese one hell of a licking,” the Secretary of State told Emmet Hughes. But Eisenhower was by now wholly committed to a Korean settlement. Dulles buried his misgivings.
At last the Americans perceived that they possessed the balance of advantage at the negotiating table. It seemed that time was pressing the Communists even more urgently than the UN. Mark Clark requested, and received from Washington, permission to drive home the advantage. The bombing campaign of Far East Air Force was intensified, with attacks on dams in North Korea deliberately intended to destroy crops and food supplies. The UN delegation at Panmunjom tabled a new, and declaredly final, proposal: a single neutral power would screen all reluctant POW repatriates within ninety days, inside Korea. If this proposal was rejected, all unwilling North Korean repatriates would be unilaterally freed inside Korea within a month. The UN air attack on the North would also be intensified.
Yet even as the Western world waited impatiently and expectantly for decisive news from Panmunjom, for an end to the long stalemate of which the Allies had grown so weary, inside South Korea entirely different emotions reached the boiling point. For President Syngman Rhee and his followers, the prospective settlement that offered peace to Seoul’s foreign allies signaled the collapse of all their hopes. Always an obsessively stubborn man, Rhee was now also a bitter one. He saw plainly that Eisenhower proposed to accept a cease-fire based on the permanent division of Korea and a continuance of a permanent Communist threat to the Seoul government. He declared again and again that he would never countenance a settlement that did not remove the Chinese from North Korea and effectively demilitarize the North. His persistent warnings of imminent American betrayal made a profound impact even on those of his countrymen who detested him. If the anti-American rallies in major cities were inspired by Rhee’s agents, they were attended by many Koreans full of genuine fears for their society’s future if the Americans withdrew, leaving South Korea at the mercy of the Communists beyond the cease-fire line. Even opposition politicians in the National Assembly joined the desperate clamor. Rhee now directly threatened Eisenhower: if a deal was made at Panmunjom which permitted the Chinese to remain in North Korea, the ROK Army would continue the fight unaided, if need be, until the Communists were pushed north of the Yalu. However vain this threat in pure military terms, it caused the utmost alarm in diplomatic and political ones. Rhee’s behavior, it seemed, might now shatter the entire delicate fabric of the peace talks.
Mark Clark did his utmost to assuage the Korean President’s fears. The expansion of the ROK Army would proceed whatever the outcome at Panmunjom, the American assured him. He believed that he had been successful in persuading Rhee of the futility of seeking to sabotage the peace negotiations. Clark cabled the JCS, “He is bargaining now to get a security pact, to obtain more economic aid, and to make his people feel he is having a voice in the armistice negotiations.” The infinitely obstinate Korean was not finished yet.
Nor were the Chinese. On April 26 their delegation at the peace talks entered a new proposal about the prisoners: three months after a cease-fire those who refused repatriation should be moved for another six months to a neutral state, where representatives of their own government would have access to them. Those who still refused repatriation at the end of this process would remain in confinement while further negotiations were held to decide their fate. American counterproposals were rejected. For four days the Communists harangued the UN delegation across the conference table, in a return to the exchanges of stultifying rhetoric that characterized the earlier stages of the talks. Finally, the talks were adjourned. Clark consulted with Washington.
To the American’s acute embarrassment, his government now determined to make the very concession that it had refused for so long, that was certain to provoke a new upheaval in relations with President Rhee: the UN delegation was to agree that Koreans, as well as Chinese, who refused repatriation should be handed over to the Indian neutral supervisory commission. Rhee’s rage, when this news was broken to him, brought relations between Washington and Seoul to their lowest ebb since the war began. The Korean threatened to withdraw his army from the UN Command. The Americans, in their turn, undertook hasty secret preparations to implement Plan Ever-ready, a politico-military operation to seize control of South Korea from Rhee’s regime. If it proved necessary to launch Ever-ready, the Korean President “would be held in protective custody, incommunicado” unless he agreed to accept the terms reached at Panmunjom. Either his Prime Minister, Chang Taek Sang, would be installed as head of government or, failing his consent, a military regime would be established. On May 29, Dulles and Wilson—the Defense Secretary—gave Clark authority to take whatever steps he considered necessary in Korea in the event of a “grave emergency.” They did not explicitly approve the proposal for Rhee’s detention. But they gave their commander in chief almost unlimited discretion to act as he saw fit in an internal crisis in Korea.
By May 25 it was apparent that the Communists were ready to accept the modified American proposals for the exchange of prisoners. Mark Clark drove to Rhee’s home to present the bitterly unwelcome news. Rhee received him alone, forcefully denounced the armistice proposals and the United States’ foolish course of appeasement of the Communists. Clark departed, still uncertain what the Korean intended to do. The negotiations at Panmunjom continued. On June 8 agreement was at last reached on the terms for repatriation of prisoners. Those who wished to go home could be exchanged immediately. Those who did not would be left in the hands of the Repatriation Commission for ninety days, during which their governments would have free access to them. Their future would then be discussed for a further thirty days by a “political conference.” After that period those who remained would be considered civilians.
The details of this arrangement were still being concluded on the night of June 18, 1953 when, to the astonishment and bewilderment of the handful of Americans at the huge Pusan POW compound, they saw that the main gates were open and a vast herd of North Koreans were streaming out into the countryside, watched with supine indifference by their South Korean guards. The same process was taking place at three other compounds around the country. Some 25,000 North Koreans who had expressed unwillingness to return to their homeland after the armistice disappeared into the darkness. President Rhee had acted. Seoul radio warned escapees to beware of American soldiers seeking to apprehend them. Seoul’s soldiers and police gave the men clothing and directed them toward shelter. Even as U.S. troops were rushed to the compounds to take over guard duties, liberation operations continued. By June 22 only 9,000 North Koreans remained in captivity, out of a total of 35,400. Only 1,000 of those who had gone were rounded up. The mass liberation had been one of the most efficiently organized exercises in the history of the ramshackle Seoul regime.
In Washington it caused genuine consternation. What now, if the Communists regarded Rhee’s action as sufficient cause to break off the negotiations? The Administration hastened publicly to deplore the Korean’s action and dissociate the United States from it. For days Washington waited anxiously for a sign from Peking. When at last it came, deep sighs of relief were audible at the State Department. Broadcasts from the New China News Agency deplored the episode but displayed a willingness to listen to American explanations. The delegation at Panmunjom provided them. They were accepted. The peace talks entered their final phase.
Yet now the critical conversations were taking place not at Panmunjom but in Syngman Rhee’s office. It was a matter of paramount importance to secure the Korean President’s public consent. To achieve this, the Americans were prepared to threaten to abandon absolutely the Seoul regime if it was not forthcoming. Yet it was essential that no word of the strength of American determination should leak out to the Communists, for it would immeasurably strengthen their hand . . . and their determination. Through the last days of June and the early days of July, Rhee spent hours closeted in private talks with Mark Clark and President Eisenhower’s special envoy, Walter Robertson. Into Robertson’s ear Rhee poured his interminable grievances against the United States. At each session the elderly President appeared to change the grounds of his demands.
Rhee’s obduracy now remained the sole obstacle to the signing of an armistice. Even as he and his American guests talked in Seoul, on the battlefield United Nations troops were repelling the heaviest Chinese offensive for two years. After a long period of stagnation at the front, the Communists plainly had determined to drive home to the South Koreans their military vulnerability. Some 100,000 Communist troops struck across the front of five ROK divisions. The South Koreans were thrown back in disarray up to five miles before a vast UN artillery concentration was laid in the path of the enemy offensive. In June 2.7 million rounds were fired on the UN front, a million more than in any month of the war thus far. While the Communists sought to demonstrate their will to prevail on the battlefield if they were denied an acceptable peace at the conference table, the UN proved its ability to deploy massed firepower to thwart them. Heavy fighting continued into July. The UN suffered 17,000 casualties, including 3,333 killed, in the twenty days between agreement in principle being reached between the delegations at Panmunjom and Syngman Rhee acknowledging his readiness to accept it.
For accept Rhee finally did, on July 9. He would not sign the armistice, he declared. But he would no longer obstruct it. On July 12 the United States and the Republic of Korea announced their agreement on truce terms. Privately, the UN Command allowed the Communists to know that they would give no support to independent offensive action by the ROK Army.
Glimpses of sun broke through the heavy clouds overhanging Panmunjom on the early morning of July 27. During the night carpenters had worked in the rain to complete the building where the armistice was to be signed. Before the ceremony could take place, however, Mark Clark insisted upon the removal of two Communist “peace dove” propaganda symbols from the pagoda and the creation of a new entrance to avoid the necessity for his delegation to pass through the enemy area of the building. If such details seemed petty, their importance in negotiation with the Communists had been grasped over two painful years of experience. A guard of honor, composed of representatives of each army that had fought for the UN cause, flanked the southern approach. Only the South Koreans were missing. Rhee would allow his soldiers no part in a process he detested.
At 10 A.M. precisely the two delegations entered the building from opposite sides. It was two years and seventeen days since talks began. Some pedant or public relations man calculated that 18,000,000 words had been exchanged at 575 separate meetings. Now Lieutenant General William K. Harrison led in the UN contingent with studied casualness. His party strolled forward, then sat back easily in their chairs, while the Communists, wooden-faced, took their places with an air of rigid formality. Harrison sat down at a table marked by a small UN flag and began to sign the first of the nine blue-backed copies of the armistice agreement. General Nam Il sat at the North Korean-flagged table. Without a word or a sign, the two men went through the formalities, while in the distance the crump of the guns went on. By 10:12 A.M. it was all over. Still without a word, the two men got up and departed through their allotted exits. It was done.
A few hours later Mark Clark signed the documents at UN Advanced Headquarters at Mansan-ni. The former wartime commander of the Fifth Army found the experience repugnant. “I cannot find it in me to exult in this hour,” he said in a short radio broadcast afterward. “Rather it is a time for prayer, that we may succeed in our difficult endeavor to turn this armistice to the advantage of mankind.” Later, in his memoirs, he declared that the moment “capped my career, but it was a cap without a feather.” He bitterly regretted becoming “the first U.S. Army commander in history to sign an armistice without victory.” Clark was among those who had always believed that the UN should have bombed beyond the Yalu, who shared many of Joseph McCarthy’s fears of secret enemies at the heart of America’s government. To the lanky, single-minded general, this inconclusive conclusion of the long and bloody experience of Korea was infinitely distasteful. To the end of their days he and other senior American military men would continue to cherish the conviction that there was another, a better way to peace—through military victory. At the Korean Embassy in Washington, Han Pyo Wook sat in the office he had occupied through three years of war and in which he had witnessed the first diplomatic acts of the drama: “There was no celebration,” he said, “only bleak looks. We had fought the armistice to the end. How could we survive, with a million Chinese in North Korea? There was a very great sense of disappointment.”16 But many others, the men on the mountains from coast to coast of Korea, were merely content that there was peace.
• • •
In the last few hours before the cease-fire came into effect at 10 P.M., on some sectors of the front the artillery of both sides fired with redoubled, passionate futility. “It was like the Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve rolled into one,” said Lieutenant Bill Livsey of the 7th Infantry. He and many of the men around him could not believe that this vast, insensate din could be hushed according to a schedule. They were astonished, almost awed, to discover that at 10 P.M., 2200 hours, a sudden deafening silence fell upon the line. “There was no elation. We were just so damn happy that it was over,” said Livsey.17 In the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment sector, word came over the radio from battalion headquarters that other ranks might venture into no-man’s-land, but no officers were to do so. Within a few hours little clusters of Chinese appeared in front of the wire, bearing bottles of rice spirit and little glass rings inscribed with the word “peace.”
At dawn on July 28, Lieutenant Chris Snider of the Canadian Brigade watched, fascinated, with his men as the bare hillside opposite suddenly grew a forest of Chinese figures: “They all came out. My God, there were thousands of them, more than I ever thought possible, on every hill, standing gazing at us. Some of our people thought they must have been brought forward specially, to impress us.”18
On the U.S. 7th Division’s sector of the front, the commanding general, Arthur Trudeau, ritually pulled the lanyard to fire his formation’s last round of the war, picked up the shell case as a souvenir, and drove back to his command post for a few celebratory drinks with his staff, to musical accompaniment from the CP band, in which he played the banjo. “I was happy it was over,” he said. “It was apparent that all we were going to do was sit there and hold positions. There wasn’t going to be any victory. All we could do was go on losing more lives. In those last few months, I lost men faster than Westmoreland at any stage of the Vietnam War except Tet.”19 Private Alan Maybury of the Durham Light Infantry said, “We didn’t celebrate victory. We celebrated being able to go home.”20
Lieutenant Clyde Fore of the 27th Infantry was on his way home to America aboard a hospital ship when the truce was signed. “There was no rejoicing—we were just sad and quiet. This was the first time Americans had ever accepted a no-win war. Everybody else was acclimatized to no-win wars, but we were not. To me, Korea had been an abomination. So many people had died, for what?”21
Many of the same mixed feelings pervaded the ranks of the opposing army. Were the men of the Chinese 23rd Army Group disappointed to go home without victory? Wang Zhu Guang, one of its staff officers, lingers before answering, “We did our best. We felt that it was difficult to continue the war, to conquer the whole of Korea. We did our best. I was happy it was over. We talked to the men in the most down-to-earth manner, explained the situation. They were happy. We never expected to get the whole of Korea. We were told that we were going to support the Korean people in getting the Americans out of Korea, stopping the American invasion. But exactly how far—that was not made clear.”22
• • •
When dawn came men on the UN line peered out across the silent valleys between themselves and the Chinese. In many places little clusters of bold spirits slipped forward through the wire and the minefields, searching with intense curiosity for their former enemies. What did they look like, these strange creatures who had been glimpsed only momentarily through binoculars or as screaming shadows in the darkness of an attack? The same curiosity possessed their enemies. On the low ground between positions, there were stilted little encounters. The Chinese passed over beer and bottles of rice wine. UN troops offered chocolate and cigarettes. Some Chinese made it apparent that they were as delighted that the war was ended as the Westerners. But these meetings could scarcely be called fraternization. They were impelled not by fellow feeling for the enemy, but by the same impulses that would provoke any earthman to inspect visiting aliens.
• • •
Inevitably, the most intense emotional drama of the days after the armistice surrounded the release of the prisoners. The Communists, truckload after truckload of them being driven north to the release point at Panmunjom, were in haste to dispel any suggestion that they had been well treated in the South. Some gashed their new fatigues into ribbons to make clear that they had been clad in rags. Others cast out of the trucks the cigarettes, toothpaste, chocolate with which they had been provided. The most dramatic gestures of all were made in the last miles before the convoy reached the exchange point. Thousands of North Korean and Chinese prisoners stripped off their clothes and boots and hurled them away onto the road. They chose to return naked to their own people, uncontaminated by the contemptible handouts of capitalism. When the convoys had passed, one of the most unforgettable images of the post-armistice exchange was that of the empty road, strewn for miles with discarded fatigues and footwear.
Yet the other, still more memorable moment was that of the return of the United Nations prisoners from the North: some gaunt men, some broken men, some clutching the bitter shame and memory of collaboration, others physically devastated by paying the price of resistance. Some came weeping into “Freedom Village,” the encampment south of the exchange line, where beneath the “Welcome Home” arch a small army of interrogators, doctors, and psychiatrists waited to receive them. Some strode boldly in, others shambled uncertainly into a life whose reality they had almost been taught to deny. “Ninety percent of us would have much preferred to be liberated by our own forces than released by the Chinese,” said Private First Class David Fortune. “The shame, if it was shame, lay in being let go.”23 But it was enough to be free. They gorged themselves on bowl after bowl of ice cream while the psychiatrists talked to them. Each man was processed and examined to check whether he was fit for press interviews or immediate repatriation. The first bitter denunciations of collaboration spilled forth, from prisoners who had been containing their hatred and disgust for years, in anticipation of this moment. Others—those who nursed private guilts—began to mumble the excuses and explanations that would haunt the balance of their lives. “The average POW was not really a human being when he was released,” said Private Fortune. “He was a wild animal.” Fortune, like many others, continued to lose weight for weeks after his release, and worked his way through many women and many bottles of whiskey before he felt sufficiently sated to come to terms with life at a normal tenor.
Within a month of the commencement of “Operation Big Switch” on August 5, 75,823 Communist prisoners had been sent north, 5,640 of these Chinese. The Communists, in their turn, handed over 12,773 men, 3,597 of them American, 7,862 South Korean. The Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission in the Demilitarized Zone took over 22,604 prisoners from the United Nations. Of these, 137 eventually agreed to repatriation. The remainder elected for resettlement in South Korea or Formosa. Of the prisoners in Communist hands, 359 initially declined to go home. Ten of these—two American and eight Korean—changed their minds while in the custody of the Repatriation Commission. But for the remainder—325 Koreans, 21 Americans, and one Briton (Andrew Condron)—there was no emotional arrival at Freedom Village. To the astonishment and profound dismay of their fellow countrymen, they chose to join the society of their former captors.
In the compound in the Demilitarized Zone where the British Marine Andrew Condron and the Americans refusing repatriation were held in Indian custody, the renegades appeared before a press conference to explain their conversion to the Communist cause. Their decision sent shock waves through their own societies. What diabolical techniques could the Communists have employed upon them to cause men to choose a life of rice and cotton suits in preference to a return to Glasgow or Jersey City? What sort of reflection was it upon American political motivation and military training that while twenty-one Americans had been successfully Communist indoctrinated, not a single Turkish prisoner had succumbed? At a moment when American political self-confidence was under great strain from McCarthyism, the growing alarm about “enemies within” their own society, here was hard evidence of the Communist capability to make conversions even amid the brutality of a prison-camp regime. Seeds of fear and doubt were sown in America which took years to root out.
The British were disposed to take a less alarmist view of the impact of Communist captivity upon their own men, proportionately fewer of whom proved to have been successfully indoctrinated than among the Americans. Yet, a decade later, British complacency would be sorely shaken by the revelation that the diplomat George Blake, captured in June 1950 when he was serving as vice-consul in Seoul, had been successfully “turned” during the three years that followed. He operated undetected for years as an important Soviet agent.
The Chinese, oddly enough, seemed profoundly embarrassed by their twenty-two foreign converts. They issued them with Western-style suits and fedoras and shipped them by train to Tsinan. From there they were dispersed around China to spend as many years as they could endure studying or translating or working at such jobs as the Chinese could find them. They were actively discouraged from learning Chinese. Contact with civilians, above all women civilians, remained very difficult. Over the years that followed, most quietly trickled back to the United States as their patience with Chinese life—and Chinese patience with their Western habits—expired.
• • •
General S. L. A. Marshall, perhaps America’s finest combat historian of the twentieth century, described Korea as “the century’s nastiest little war.” In those days, before Vietnam, its claim to that title seemed unlikely to be eclipsed: 1,319,000 Americans had served in the Korean theater and 33,629 did not return. A further 105,785 were wounded. Forty-five percent of all U.S. casualties were incurred after the first armistice negotiations with the Communists took place. The South Korean Army lost 415,000 killed and 429,000 wounded. The Commonwealth—Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—lost 1,263 killed and 4,817 wounded. Belgium, Colombia, Ethiopia, France, Greece, Holland, the Philippines, Thailand, and Turkey among them lost 1,800 killed and 7,000 wounded, of whom almost half were Turks. The Americans estimated that more than 1.5 million Chinese and North Koreans had died. If this estimate is exaggerated, it seems reasonable to assume that China cannot have lost less than half a million men, given the manner in which she fought her war. Few people of any nationality, four years earlier, would have supposed that barren peninsula would ever be worth any fraction of those lives.