18

Hindsight

Many United Nations veterans came home from Korea to discover that their experience was of no interest whatsoever to their fellow countrymen. The war seemed an unsatisfactory, inglorious, and thus unwelcome memory. It had begun as a crusade to save South Korea from communism, and enjoyed a brief public popularity in Europe as well as the United States. This died in the mud and blood of retreat in the winter of 1950. Thereafter, Korea was perceived only as a running sore, belatedly cauterized in July 1953. A woman saw Private Warren Avery in the street of his hometown in Connecticut when he was discharged from the service and remarked severely, “So you finally got out of jail?”¹ John “Rotorhead” Thornton of the U.S. Navy returned from captivity to hear his wife declare that he had been wasting his life. Once too often friends had asked her, “Gee, I haven’t seen John for a while. Where is he?” The first night after his return, they argued into the night. Thornton said, “I guess I just couldn’t accept the fact that we hadn’t won, that we couldn’t beat the Communists. The only people who welcomed me back were my neighbors in Philadelphia, who gave me a block party.” His Navy Cross had been posted to his home through the mail. “I thought I would go round telling people what communism is—hanging Major Hume up by his thumbs until he froze, for instance. I ended up feeling like most returning POWs I know—that I was shoveling shit against the tide. You talk about Mao and the millions he killed, and they just say you’re a McCarthyite.” Many POWs came home to discover that their wives had “made other arrangements.” Most felt themselves returning to a new, unfamiliar world that cared little for their experience. “We went away to Glenn Miller. We came back to Elvis Presley,” said Thornton without enthusiasm.

In the Southern states, perhaps, traditional patriotism was a more active force than in the East. Private First Class David Fortune was embarrassed by the display that greeted him in his home town of Pickens, South Carolina, after more than two years on the Yalu. They gave him a brand-new 1953 Ford Fairlane and treated him as a hero: “In my part of the country, I don’t know anybody who opposed the war.” He spent three years’ pay in three months and declared proudly that at the end of it, he had nothing to show.

• • •

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

• • •

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

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

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

Yet it remains a tribute to the respect the United States could call upon in 1950 that an international force was committed at all. For a brief historical moment the combination of foreign gratitude for America’s military role in World War II and economic assistance in its aftermath, together with real fear of imminent conflict with the Soviet Union, enabled Washington to mobilize allied troops for an Asian war few Europeans believed in, once the first shock and alarm of June 1950 had ebbed away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

• • •

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

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

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 count for least. They could exploit the West’s greatest single weakness: the impatience of democracies. It had 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 that 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 counteraggression.”

“Worthwhile? It was more worthwhile than Vietnam,” said Major Ed Simmonds of the U.S. Marine Corps. “In 1950 the individual GI couldn’t see much to admire in the average Korean. But looking back on it, the war revitalized NATO. It caused us to drop the tradition of demobilizing 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 Louisianian whom 1950 found as a private soldier in 7th Cavalry: “A lot of us feels that Truman made a big mistake by not leting McArthur bomb the bridges on the Yalu river, allso not letting him bomb the Chinese that were mass in China. Another big mistake was in 1951, the Chinese made there last big offensive against us and we stop them cold, right after that we could have went 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 support our government in the war. The war set the Chinese back 10 to 20 years where in the United States the big companys get richer. Don’t get me wrong I am not sorry I went and fought it was an honor to fight the communists because it had to be done, however I would not do it again for a million dollars.”

Private First Class Bill Shirk, an Ohioan 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 them 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 U.S. 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 1950s, 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 judgment 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 nuclear weapons. 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 even in self-defense, 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 attitude 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 done for South Korea, the achievement would have been a cause for national self-congratulation.

Korea 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 stabilized, 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 misjudgment: 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 self-respect she possesses today from her part in the war. Indeed, most South Koreans emerged from the war conditioned either to an absolutely cynical pursuit of personal survival or burdened by self-disgust. South Korea gained her self-respect from what she achieved by her 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 judgments 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 professed hostility 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 behavior 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’ nonimperialistic 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 leader-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 materiel 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.

Yet the Chinese, who were the most passive partners in the original North Korean invasion of the South, could argue a legitimate determination not to tolerate an American presence on the Yalu. It was MacArthur’s commitment to sweep north from the 38th Parallel that introduced a new strand of confusion into the debate about the merits of the United Nations’ operation in Korea. Until that moment few detached observers around the world could deny that the UN flag was flying in an honorable cause, the restitution of the status quo in Korea. But from the moment UN forces crossed the 38th Parallel, the highest ideals of the United Nations became submerged beneath the foreign policy purposes of the United States. Yet MacArthur must not bear sole responsibility for the decision to drive north. Not only in Washington, but in London and other Western capitals, in the flush of victory at Inchon it seemed possible to achieve a cheap, absolute success over the Communists. If some statesmen and diplomats possessed reservations, they did not express them very strongly. Their silence, or at least muted expressions of concern, could reasonably be interpreted as consent in Washington and at the Dai Ichi.

MacArthur’s denunciation of the Chinese intervention as a treacherous act will not do. Peking gave repeated warnings of the limits of its patience. It could plead the interests of self-defense in crossing the Yalu with at least as much conviction as President Kennedy in threatening war if the Soviets placed missile bases in Cuba. The Peking government had only recently emerged victorious from a war against Nationalist armies supplied and supported by the United States. With American sponsorship, the Nationalists could still pose a formidable threat to Mao Tse Tung’s fragile government. Some Americans today, as well as in 1950, would argue that since Mao Tse Tung’s Communist regime represented an evil force in the world, it was legitimate for the forces of justice to adopt any means to destabilize and ultimately undo it. But most of America’s allies, today as in 1950, find this argument unacceptable. The British, in particular, have always sought accommodation with Communist China and acknowledged the legitimacy of the People’s Republic. This much granted, it was unreasonable to expect the Chinese to stand idly by while the United States deployed an army along the Yalu.

Yet the Chinese, in their turn, displayed considerable strategic naiveté. The testimony of Chinese officers makes clear that they greatly underestimated the power of a Western army. Because they had just defeated an American-sponsored and -equipped Nationalist army, Mao Tse Tung and his commanders appear to have expected the same level of performance, and the same weaknesses, in the U.S. Army itself. This view was reinforced by their early experience of fighting Americans in November and December 1950. The Chinese undoubtedly went into Korea with the limited objective of driving back the Americans to a respectable distance from the Yalu. But in December 1950, in the exultation of tactical success, they made a strategic error precisely mirroring that of the Americans a few weeks earlier: they saw an opportunity to expand a limited operation into a crushing and symbolic wider victory. Thus they drove on southward in hot pursuit of the fleeing Americans, and thus, with their supply lines overextended and their resources of everything but manpower almost exhausted, they met the full might of a Western army, regrouped under Ridgway. Throughout the two years that followed, the combatant nations felt themselves engaged in an inescapable struggle for face. Each side having rashly overreached its limited war aims, peace became attainable only after a long process during which the combatants became once more reconciled to these. The war drove China into diplomatic and economic isolation and made her an absolute dependent of the Soviet Union for a generation. “Peking’s action,” Dr. Rosemary Foot has written, “displayed its revolutionary zeal, inexperience in world affairs, troublemaking capacity in the immediate vicinity of its borders, and exaggerated sense of its own power.”

But if China was denied its ideological triumph in Korea, the war made Mao Tse Tung’s nation a great power in the eyes of the world. The impact of that first crushing Chinese victory in the winter of 1950 was never entirely lost. The spectacle of a heavily armed and armored Western army fleeing before Marshal Peng’s cotton-clad divisions was not forgotten. Most men who fought against the Chinese in Korea went home with a considerable regard for their fighting qualities, which made it all the more remarkable that, in Vietnam a decade later, a new generation of Americans proved once more reluctant to believe that Asian soldiers could match Westerners on the battlefield. In Korea, China convinced the world that she was a force to be reckoned with, after centuries in which she had been dismissed as an ineffectual society of mandarins and warlords. The chief negative cost of the war to Peking was that it prevented the Communists—perhaps forever—from gaining control of Formosa, today’s Taiwan. In June 1950, Washington was weary of Chiang Kai Shek and his defeated Nationalists. Had it not been for the North Korean invasion, they would have almost certainly been left moldering on Formosa until the Communists overwhelmed them. Instead, they became a central element in America’s policy for resisting Communist expansion in the Far East, the beneficiaries of vast military and economic aid, which made possible the powerful modern industrial state they created over the next thirty years.

Thousands of men who fought for the United Nations in Korea are deeply moved today by the gratitude that South Koreans still display for the salvation of their country from the Communists more than thirty years ago. Perhaps this has been enhanced by watching South Vietnam submerged into a Communist state. “I see Koreans today, and the respect they show for us,” said Private Bill Norris of the 27th Infantry, “and I contrast this with the animosity I saw for us in Europe, after World War II ended. They didn’t want us over there. In Korea, I see gratitude. I never felt exploited by a Korean, in the way we all were as GIs by the French and the Belgians in 1945. In the marketplace in Seoul, I could buy stuff for the same price a Korean paid for it. I felt safe there.” Sergeant John Richardson, of 2nd Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, believed passionately that the war was worthwhile: “In October 1983, I had the great privilege of going back to Korea. It was the thrill of a lifetime. On my return, I simply told the Calgary Branch of the PPCLI Association that I was convinced that our fallen comrades rest in a country where their sacrifice is fully appreciated.”

“We stopped communism, didn’t we?” said Bob Campbell of the 1st Marines. They did indeed. At the 38th Parallel a border persists today between one of the more advanced and one of the most backward societies in Asia. The people of North Korea have paid the bitterest price of all for Kim Il Sung’s adventure in June 1950. To this day they remain the prisoners of the aging, obsessive, perhaps demented old dictator in one of the most backward societies in Asia. Fifteen years after the Chinese set about opening up a new relationship with the West, the North Koreans reject any attempt to do so, and even their relations with Peking are strained. North Korea exists in pitiful isolation, a society dominated by poverty and the cult of Kim Il Sung.

South Korea, meanwhile, has become one of the greatest economic and industrial powers in Asia. The harshest price it has paid for the war is that, even today, it remains a society under siege. The threat from the North has never receded. Pyongyang maintains a constant propaganda war and a military capability that cannot be ignored. North Korea’s constant efforts to undermine the South by subversive activity, and periodically by guerrilla and terrorist operations across the border, provide the justification for the military machine that still dominates South Korea. Syngman Rhee was deposed in 1960, when the United States publicly withdrew its support from the old dictator after he had rigged one election too many. A generation after his fall a procession of more or less repressive military, or military-influenced, governments rule from Seoul. Political dissent is ruthlessly suppressed. The United States maintains a strong military presence. Washington has always tacitly accepted the tough domestic policies of South Korea’s governments, maintaining the bastion against communism. Seoul won the warm approval of the United States during the Vietnam War, repaying the aid given in 1950 by sending a South Korean division to Indochina which proved one of the most formidable fighting formations in the struggle against the Communists. It also earned a reputation as one of the most savage and ruthless in its dealings with the Vietnamese. Ironically, it was the Vietnam War which gave the Korean economy its decisive boost to takeoff. South Korea today displays all the traditional qualities of its people: energy, organization, fiercely nationalistic competitiveness, ruthlessness. Much of the country the UN armies knew has vanished under unlovely steel and concrete.

Some critics regard all this, as they later regarded the shortcomings of the American-sponsored regime in Vietnam, as sufficient reason to deny the Seoul government all claim to legitimacy. Yet others—the author among them as a correspondent in Vietnam—acknowledged the failings of the Saigon or Seoul regimes while denying that these provided sufficient reason to concede victory to the Communists. The evidence of equal, indeed greater, evils wrought by the Communist forces could not be gainsaid. Rarely in the world is a choice offered between a cause of absolute virtue and one of absolute evil: even the Allied cause in the Second World War was confused for many participants by discovering the bloody hand of Joseph Stalin on the side of the democracies. In Korea, as in Vietnam, the democracies supported the cause of a flawed society. Yet they were fighting against opponents representing an even harsher tyranny. Who can doubt that if Hanoi had been defeated, South Vietnam would today enjoy the same prosperity as South Korea, and its people at least a greater measure of freedom than they can look for under communism?

Today the people of South Korea have achieved a prosperity and fulfillment that gives them immense satisfaction. In 1950, Won Jung Kil was twenty-one, an unemployed welder eking out an existence in Inchon, strongly hostile to the Rhee regime. He was conscripted in 1951 and spent six years of wretched near-starvation as a ROK army driver: “I hated the officers. They had too much of everything. Pay? We had no pay. There was just a little food. No Korean enjoyed the war.” Yet today, Won can say, “It was worthwhile. We are fine, we have enough to eat. I like our life now very much.” The simple, material satisfaction is very deep for people who have come such a long way in thirty-five years. They look back upon the war as a nightmare for their nation. But they reveal a real gratitude for the campaign waged by the United Nations that enabled their society to retain its independence, that made possible everything they have today. Few Westerners, looking upon the respective circumstances of North and South Korea today, can doubt that the West’s intervention in 1950 saved the Southerners from a tragic fate, and indeed opened the way to a future for them infinitely better than anything attainable under Kim Il Sung. If the Korean War was a frustrating, profoundly unsatisfactory experience, more than thirty-five years later it still seems a struggle that the West was utterly right to fight.