2
In the course of 1949, relations between North and South Korea, the tempo of mutual propaganda hysteria, rose sharply. In the South constant military pressure eroded the strength of the Communist guerrillas in the mountains. In April 1949, Pyongyang invited South Korea’s anti-Rhee leaders to attend a “coalition conference.” Of 545 delegates present, 240 were from the South. Rhee denounced them, not unreasonably, as “Communist stooges.” In August a new Communist “Supreme People’s Assembly” met in Haiju, just north of the 38th Parallel. At this a “People’s Democratic Republic” embracing both North and South Korea was announced. A South Korean was its nominated Foreign Minister. But on the 38th Parallel, responsibility for border incidents was by no means a monopoly of Pyongyang. In May 1949, in one of the most serious incidents, South Korean forces penetrated up to 2.5 miles into North Korean territory and attacked local villages. In a climate of intense mutual mistrust, in December the British Foreign Office asked the War Office for a military assessment of the situation in Korea. It received an interesting response:
“In the past [wrote Major J. R. Ferguson Innes] it had always been our view that irrespective of strengths the North Korean forces would have little difficulty in dealing effectively with the forces of South Korea should full-scale hostilities break out. This somewhat naturally (since they raised, equipped and trained South Korean forces) was not the American view. Recently, however, they have been coming round to our way of thinking regarding the capabilities of the respective forces. . . .
“On the question of aggression by the North, there can be no doubt whatever that their ultimate objective is to overrun the South; and I think in the long term there is no doubt that they will do so, in which case, as you so aptly remark, the Americans will have made a rather handsome contribution of equipment to the military strength of Asiatic Communism. As to their method of achieving their object, short of World War III beginning, I think they will adopt the well-tried tactics of preparing the country from within rather than resort to open aggression, although ‘frontier incidents’ will doubtless continue. . . .
“Regarding American policy, if in fact one exists, towards South Korea, I can only say we know little, and of their future intentions even less. . . . Whilst being in no doubt about future North Korean (or Soviet) plans regarding South Korea, we think an invasion is unlikely in the immediate view; however, if it did take place, I think it improbable that the Americans would become involved. The possession of South Korea is not essential for Allied strategic plans, and though it would obviously be desirable to deny it to the enemy, it would not be of sufficient importance to make it the cause of World War III. Meanwhile, we must accept an uneasy status quo and hope for the best.”1
• • •
Brigadier General W. L. Roberts, commanding officer of the American KMAG Military Assistance Group in Korea, not surprisingly took a more sanguine view of the South Korean Army than the British officer quoted above. In a letter to General Charles Bolté, Director of Plans at the Pentagon, in March 1950 he urged that Americans should play a prominent role in stiffening ROK formations:
“If South Korea is called upon to defend itself against aggression from the North, its ground army is capable of doing an excellent job. If American advisers are present (even on Regimental and Division level) it will do an even better job, for we have found Americans are leaned on heavily the rougher it gets. In other words, the advisers will almost command except in name.”
Here, of course, was the root of many delusions that were to plague the U.S. Army in Asia for the next generation. The belief that American officers could, in effect, officer Asian troops to the same effect that the British had achieved with their Indian army for two hundred years persisted into Indochina. Worse, there was the notion that they could temper control with politeness by accompanying units merely as “advisers.” Later, as the ROK Army expanded in the course of war, this principle of giving Koreans American support would be extended so that Korean formations were integrated with American ones. The Koreans’ knowledge of the absolute lack of confidence with which they were regarded by their allies and mentors contributed materially to justifying this. But in March 1950, despite his optimistic view of ROK capabilities, Roberts acknowledged that the strategic perspective did not favor Seoul’s forces:
“All G-2 sources tell that the North Koreans have up to 100 Russian planes and a training program for pilots. You know and I know what 100 planes can do to troops, to towns and to transport on roads.
“So, if South Korea were attacked today by the inferior [sic] ground forces of North Korea plus their Air Corps, I feel that South Korea would take a bloody nose. Again then, knowing these people somewhat, I feel they would follow the apparent winner and South Korea would be gobbled up to be added to the rest of Red Asia.
“This is a fat nation now with all its ECA goods, with warehouses bulging with plenty of rice from a good crop even if their finances are shaky with great inflationary tendencies. It is getting into the position of an excellent prize of war; strategically it points right into the heart of Japan and into the hands of an enemy it weakens the Japanese bastion of Western defence.”2
• • •
Washington’s view of the importance of Korea to the anti-Communist cause was changing. But the Administration’s thinking remained confused, and so did the signals that it sent out across the world. The critical force in United States policy toward the Far East by the summer of 1950 was the deep bitterness and frustration of the American people about the “loss” of China to the Communists. The defeat of Chiang Kai Shek’s American-sponsored Nationalist armies had been a profound shock and source of sorrow not only to the legendary “China lobby” but to many Americans who had grown up all their lives with a sense of missionary commitment to China. The vast Asian society had been a central force in the lives of such men as Henry Luce, who put Chiang on the cover of Time magazine a record seven times. In the case of great industrialists such as Alfred Kohlberg, economic interest marched hand in hand with a real personal passion for China. America’s cash investment in Chiang’s creakingly corrupt regime had been enormous: $645 million in aid and $826 million in Lend-Lease during World War II, followed by another $2 billion in the years that followed. Asia in general, and China in particular, called deeply to many Americans in a manner that Europe did not. Europe was a fully fashioned society, often ungrateful for American influence and aid. Yet Asia seemed to lie half-made, half-civilized, wide open for all the cultural, religious, and democratic improvements that the United States could offer. Throughout the Second World War, America retained delusions about the virtue and power of Chiang Kai Shek’s regime that were shared by none of her allies. When the State Department’s admirable “old China hands” warned persistently of the hopeless corruption and incompetence of the Nationalists, of the irresistible power of Mao Tse Tung’s Communists, their reports served only to damn them long afterward. Davies, Vincent, and the others became, for conservative America, not the faithful prophets of disaster, but the agents who had contributed to bring this about. “China asked for a sword, and we gave her a dull paring knife,” declared Senator Bridges of New Hampshire. Senator Taft damned the appeasers of the State Department, “guided by a left-wing group who obviously wanted to get rid of Chiang, and were willing at least to turn China over to the Communists for that purpose.” The fall of China to the Communists, far from convincing Americans of the need to ensure that the regimes they supported possessed some validity within their own societies, merely persuaded much of the United States that anti-Communist regimes must be sustained and supported, however unpopular within their own societies. George Kennan sought to suggest that “a certain sentimentality toward the Chinese” among Americans “was both patronizing and dangerously naive.” Dean Acheson, Truman’s Secretary of State, was doing his utmost through 1949 to reconcile Americans to accepting the probable fall of Chiang’s last bastion, the island of Formosa.
“The unfortunate but inescapable fact is that the ominous result of the civil war in China was beyond the control of the government of the United States,” Acheson wrote, eminently sanely, in an August 1949 white paper. “Nothing that this country did or could have done within the reasonable limits of its capabilities could have changed that result; nothing that was left undone by this country has contributed to it. It was the product of internal Chinese forces, forces which this country tried to influence, but could not. A decision was arrived at within China, if only a decision by default.”
• • •
But this was now the day of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Gallup suggested that 39 percent of Americans believed in the Wisconsin Republican’s red witch hunt, that his hounding of the State Department officials who had “betrayed” China to the Communists was “a good thing.” In the words of McCarthy’s best biographer, “the political atmosphere in the spring of 1950 was such that evidence and logic were often avoided.” Senators Bridges, Knowland, and McCarran issued a statement denouncing Acheson’s China white paper as “a 1,054 page whitewash of a wishful, do-nothing policy which has succeeded only in placing Asia in danger of Soviet conquest, with its ultimate threat to the peace of the world and our own national security. . . . Growing numbers of Republicans were convinced that McCarthyism was their ticket to political power, and were determined to back Joe’s Red hunt as long as the headlines continued to bombard the Administration.” By this mid-term of Truman’s second Administration, he was already a beleaguered President, under immense domestic pressures for his alleged weakness in confronting the Communist threat at home and abroad.
Truman himself was increasingly convinced that the Soviets were risk-takers, opportunists who would press forward on every front where they detected weakness. In 1950 the memory of the 1930s was not merely vivid but a dominant force in the thinking of most Western politicians. At this historic period, when the closest advisers of the American President were men whose minds focused upon Europe as the cockpit of world affairs, the failure of the policy of appeasement of the dictators lay close to the heart of their political thought. “We are losing the Cold War,” Bernard Baruch warned Truman in April 1950. John Foster Dulles accepted office in the Administration that month, only on condition that “some early affirmative action” would be taken against “the Communist menace.” The joint State-Defense study group headed by Paul Nitze which produced the critical study of American foreign policy objectives, NSC-68, in the first months of 1950, urged much greater defense expenditure. It defined the Soviet purpose as “the complete subversion or forcible destruction of the machinery of government and structure of society in the non-Soviet world, and their replacement by an apparatus and structure subservient to and controlled by the Kremlin.” George Kennan and Chip Bohlen, two of America’s most prominent experts on the Soviets, opposed the National Security Council’s paper. They argued that Moscow was, in reality, far more cautious than the document suggested. But Acheson accepted NSC-68. Its principal conclusion—that the Soviets should be challenged wherever in the world they next embarked upon an assault on freedom—became part of the policy of the Truman Administration.
Yet whatever the validity of Washington’s assessment of Soviet intentions, the gravest charge against the United States government in 1950 was that it made a precipitate commitment to an end before it had begun to will the means. In the aftermath of World War II, the nation’s armed forces had not merely been reduced—they had been allowed to crumble to the brink of collapse. Again and again between 1947 and 1950 the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned the President that he was extending America’s diplomatic commitments beyond her military means to defend them. Among the glittering cluster of intellects around the President, by far the least impressive figure was the Defense Secretary, Louis Johnson. A political operator, a fund-raiser, an electoral grandstander, Johnson had made much political capital from his dramatic savings in the military budget. Yet it was a direct consequence of Johnson’s policies, approved by Truman, that by June 1950 MacArthur’s divisions in Korea lacked 62 percent of their infantry firepower and 14 percent of their tanks, that 80 percent of the army’s sixty-day reserve was unusable, and the army in Japan possessed only forty-five days’ supply of ammunition. It was in recognition of the desperate shortcomings of MacArthur’s army that the Defense Department agreed that Korea could be removed from the general’s theater responsibilities.
The first and most obvious manifestation of the commitment to NSC-68 was that the United States began to give active support to the French in their struggle against the Communist Vietminh in Indochina. Washington felt a growing concern that the Russians might consider some move against Japan, the centerpiece of the American defense of the Pacific basin. While Acheson remained unwilling to commit the United States to the protection of Formosa, his Assistant Secretary for the Far East, Dean Rusk, was increasingly anxious to do so.
Yet in June 1950 the hardening of attitudes within the Administration remained little understood within the United States, and scarcely at all outside it. NSC-68 has been cited as a classic example of a document whose secrecy destroyed its very purpose. Its conclusions remained unpublished for more than twenty years after they were drafted. The public signals reaching Moscow about American intentions thus remained unchanged and uncertain. Had the Russians possessed any inkling of the strength of Washington’s newfound determination to seek a battleground upon which to challenge Communist expansion, it is profoundly unlikely that Moscow would ever have allowed the North Korean invasion of June 1950 to take place.
• • •
To this day there remains no explicit, trustworthy evidence about the circumstances in which Kim Il Sung made his decision to invade South Korea in June 1950. But the circumstantial evidence is strong that the Russians sanctioned rather than instigated the attack. Plainly, it would have been impossible for Kim to act at all without the active assistance of Moscow in providing arms and supplies, and the connivance of Peking in allowing rail movements through Chinese territory. In addition, in the months before the invasion many thousands of Communist veterans who had fought with Mao Tse Tung’s armies, but were Korean by birth, returned to their homeland in the North. In sending the Koreans back, the Chinese may well have been inspired more by the urgent need to demobilize their vast forces than by any desire to reinforce Kim Il Sung’s divisions. But the effect was the same. Pyongyang’s army was strengthened by large numbers of combat veterans.
The memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, a heavily tainted source, nonetheless offer a plausible version of the events leading up to the invasion. According to Khrushchev, Kim Il Sung came to Moscow to seek Stalin’s acquiescence in his plans for war, and the North Korean was successful in convincing the Russian that he could gain a speedy victory. Mao Tse Tung agreed that the United States would not intervene, “since the war would be an internal matter which the Korean people would decide for themselves. “3 The behavior of Moscow in the months following the outbreak of war suggested Soviet reluctance to identify wholeheartedly with Kim Il Sung’s adventure, to stake everything upon his victory. The Soviets appear to have satisfied themselves that the Korean could make his attempt to unify the country under communism without intolerable political or military risk to themselves. They were probably encouraged in this view by their knowledge of the widespread Communist support within the South, which might be expected to rally when the Northerners swept across the country.
One of the foremost historians of this period, Allen S. Whiting, concludes that there was “no agreement . . . nor . . . any direct evidence on the degree to which Communist China participated in the planning. It is possible that Stalin did not even inform Mao of the forthcoming attack during their weeks of conference in Moscow, although this is highly unlikely.”4 The Chinese, the overwhelming probability suggests, were passive if acquiescent parties to North Korea’s intentions. Peking, that first summer after attaining final victory in its own civil war, had ample national problems at home, without seeking any share in those of Korea.
In the summer of 1950 a wave of intelligence reports reached both American headquarters in Tokyo, and the CIA in Washington, suggesting that the North Koreans were preparing an invasion of the south. One CIA report, of March 10, 1950, even pinpointed June as the chosen date. Later that month MacArthur’s intelligence department even prepared a report predicting a war in Korea by early summer.5 Yet, as so often on the eve of twentieth-century crises, those at the summit of power showed no sign of expecting real trouble. MacArthur repeatedly declared his disbelief in the imminence of war. His absolute lack of attention to the combat training of his divisions in Japan can be explained only by his conviction that they would not be called upon to fight. The most serious contingency Far East Command recognized was likely escalation of the Communist guerrilla struggle against Syngman Rhee, which had been in progress for many months.
But only historians can focus with such clarity on the intelligence warnings of war. The few flimsy sheets upon which these were provided reached the desks of MacArthur’s officers and the departments of Defense and State in Washington among a vast paper harvest of contradictory, confusing, often obviously unreliable information and analysis. It was the familiar intelligence problem of distinguishing “signals” from “noise.” The “noise,” that summer of 1950, came in the form of Communist threats that seemed to touch every quarter of the globe: on the occupation boundaries in Europe, at Trieste and in the oil fields of the Middle East, among the Huk guerrillas of the Philippines, on the borders of Greece and Yugoslavia. Korea was indeed recognized, in the war departments of the West, as a possible point of confrontation with the Communists. But it lay near the bottom of a long list of prospective battlefields.
• • •
The devastating North Korean artillery and mortar barrage opened at 4 A.M. on the morning of June 25, 1950. In Washington it was early afternoon on Saturday, June 24. The Communist attack, masked by a skilful deception plan in the preceding weeks, achieved complete strategic and tactical surprise. The Korean People’s Army possessed seven combat-ready divisions, an armored brigade equipped with Russian T-34 tanks, three newly activated divisions, and ample supporting artillery. Since Kim Il Sung’s army was founded in February 1948, it had been welded into an intensely motivated, well-equipped fighting force of 135,000 men. The air force, of some 200 Yak-9 fighters and Il-10 ground-attack bombers, was negligible by Western standards but sufficed to provide formidable close support for the North Korean assault and to wipe out Seoul’s pitiful handful of T-6 trainers on the ground in the first hours of war. Syngman Rhee’s 95,000 strong army had been deliberately denied armor, antitank weapons, and artillery heavier than 105 mm. In the summer of 1950 more than a third of the ROK Army’s vehicles were immobilized in want of repair. Spare parts were almost nonexistent. There were just six days’ ammunition reserve in the country. Only around a third of Rhee’s army was deployed in the line confronting the Communist assault on June 25. Like its parent regime, the ROK Army was a corrupt, demoralized body entirely devoid of the motivation that was so quickly apparent in the Communist formations.
Four Communist spearheads were soon driving south, led by their almost invulnerable armor, checked more by terrain and natural obstacles than by the ROK forces as they forged through the gaps in the hills. Ten Communist divisions, supported by 1,643 guns, streamed over the Parallel. The town of Ongin fell within hours to the KPA 6th Division. The Communist 1st Division drove for Kaesong, while in the east the 3rd and 4th Divisions took the Uijongbu corridor. Farther eastward the 5th Division mounted its own attack, supported by amphibious landings along the coast behind the collapsing ROK front. The fighting, such as it was in those first hours and day, involved only isolated stands by pockets of ROK troops. Faced by an assault of such formidable power and decision, Syngman Rhee’s army was wholly unable to mount a coherent defense by formations. Reeling, its battered and broken companies began to straggle southward, often abandoning their equipment, hastening to keep a brief bound ahead of the bleak, mustard-drab battalions of Kim Il Sung’s victorious army. At 9:30 A.M., Kim himself broadcast the version of events along the 38th Parallel which would form the basis for the public posture on Korea throughout the Communist world from 1950 until the present day:
“The South Korean puppet clique has rejected all methods for peaceful reunification proposed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and dared to commit armed aggression . . . north of the 38th parallel. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea ordered a counterattack to repel the invading troops. The South Korean puppet clique will be held responsible for whatever results may be brought about by this development.”
Four hours after the North Korean onslaught began, it was evident in Seoul that this was no new border raid. The American Ambassador in Seoul, John J. Muccio, cabled the State Department in Washington, “North Korean forces invaded Republic of Korea at several places this morning. . . . It would appear from the nature of the attack and the manner in which it was launched that it constitutes an all-out offensive against the Republic of Korea.”