Amply funded and skillfully managed, the Korean War rearmament program nevertheless had its intrinsic confusions, since it was two mobilizations for two wars. The real war in the Far East required fast and large reinforcements in men and materiel, especially after the Chinese intervention. The Department of Defense, however, had a more compelling concern: The possibility of a war with the Soviet Union. The administration’s military, diplomatic, and intelligence advisers estimated that by 1952 the Russians would have an optimum opportunity to initiate a general war with the United States and its NATO allies. By that time the Soviets were likely to have sufficient nuclear weapons—including hydrogen bombs—and aircraft to carry them to launch an attack on the continental United States. Just the threat of such an attack might so intimidate the United States that it would not use its own nuclear weapons to meet a Soviet conventional attack on Western Europe, where the Russian forces still outnumbered Western forces on an order of three to one in manpower and weapons. Even if the Soviets did not actually attack, the threat of such an attack might bring Soviet-leaning neutrality to most of Europe. The Truman administration accepted the “year of maximum danger” concept, but its dilemma extended far beyond 1952. It had to weigh the immediate demands of proxy war with the Communists against the long-term requirements of deterring general war.
U.S. Armed Forces 1945–1953
* * *
ARMY
USAAF/USAF
NAVY
MARINE CORPS
Pre-1950 estimated required forces
14 divisions 940,000 personnel
70 groups 400,000 personnel
1,043 ships 560,000 personnel
3 divisions 3 aircraft wings 108,000 personnel
Actual forces, June 1950
10 divisions 5 regiments 591,000 personnel
48 groups 411,000 personnel
683 ships 382,000 personnel
2 divisions 2 aircraft wings 74,000 personnel
Actual forces, 1953
20 divisions 18 regiments 1.5 million personnel
93 wings* 974,000 personnel
1,130 ships 808,000 personnel
3 divisions 3 aircraft wings 246,000 personnel
* * *
*The Air Force changed from groups to wings to describe two or more squadrons and supporting elements.
Constructing some sort of rational policy on military manpower dramatized the administration’s difficulties in weighing the conflicting demands of war waging and war deterring. In the Korean War’s first year the most pressing demand was to enlarge the active armed forces, accomplished by drafting 585,000 men and calling to active duty 806,000 reserves and Guardsmen. Even the massive call-up caused controversy, since the reserves, the majority of whom had had limited military training since World War II, went into active units, including those in Korea. Although the emergency required the wholesale infusion of experienced air and ground officers and enlisted men into EUSAK, the Far East Air Forces, and the 7th Fleet, the assignments caused substantial personal hardships and real equity problems. The problem was that Truman also activated eight National Guard divisions and supporting Air National Guard and ground Guard units to restore the strategic reserve in the United States, which had been stripped of regulars to reinforce EUSAK. These organizations had been receiving drill pay and included large numbers of enlisted men who had not seen World War II service. Reserve officers and NCOs fighting for the second time in Korea noticed the difference. In part to appease them, the Department of Defense introduced in early 1951 a policy with long-term implications: i.e., it would rotate combat veterans out of the war zone (and usually out of active service if so desired) after one year. The limited-tour policy increased the manpower demands, met largely by drafting 1.2 million more men, but dampened military and public criticism of the war.
In the middle of a war, the government grappled with the prospect that it would require larger standing and reserve forces after the war. It moved haltingly toward some long-range policy for an extended Cold War. Led by Truman and Marshall, enthusiasts for universal military training (UMT) resurrected their earlier proposal for compulsory short-term active service for training, followed by obligatory reserve service. Although Congress passed a Universal Military Training and Service Act in 1951, the legislation fell far short of creating a comprehensive plan. The act reaffirmed the principle of universal obligation and accepted earlier decisions to extend active-duty periods to two years and include eighteen-year-olds in the military pool. The law dealt primarily with manpower issues created by the Korean War, not its aftermath. The Congress, for example, did not tamper with two Selective Service System policies: To defer college students from immediate call-up and to allow local draft boards to make decisions on occupational and educational deferments. The law provided that veterans who had served less than three years on active duty not only retained a total of eight years of service liability, but had to serve a total of five years in ready-reserve status before reverting to the standby reserve. The distinction was significant, since ready reservists could be called to active duty by the president in an emergency without congressional approval and standby reservists could not. In other words, military service and reserve participation still flowed from the draft, not from true universal military training. Outside of voluntary participation by veterans in the reserves, reserve service appealed most to youths who sought escape from the draft. The law provided, however, that universal military training might be erected upon the extemporized manpower policies of 1950–1951.
Congress reviewed the proposals for UMT in 1951–1952 and rejected the concept, substituting instead the Armed Forces Reserve Act of 1952. The little compulsion that remained was tied to the operation of the draft. Although servicemen—draftees or volunteers—had an obligation to belong to the ready reserve if they had served less than four years on active duty, they did not have to participate in a reserve unit.
Truman’s rearmament policy rested upon the assumption that if deterrence failed, a war with the Soviet Union would be a protracted struggle in which nuclear weapons might open, but not close, the war. Although less than comprehensive, the administration’s manpower policy expressed a need for conventional forces. It also paid new attention to the potential problems of resource mobilization, enlarging its purchases of strategic materials from $1 billion (1946–1950) to $7 billion (1950–1953). In the Defense Production Act (September 1950), Congress gave Truman the power to bend industrial production toward military needs if normal contracting procedures did not suffice. Its policy of subsidizing mineral exploration produced dramatic quantities of weapons-grade uranium in the United States and Canada. Increased funding for nuclear weapons development brought important progress in the size and composition of the American nuclear arsenal. In 1951 the United States tested two small thermonuclear devices at Eniwetok in Operation GREENHOUSE, followed the next year with two additional tests during Operation IVY. One of the tests, the MIKE SHOT, incorporating Edward Teller’s experimental design for a thermonuclear bomb, produced a 10-megaton explosion. The second explosion, a fission weapon, produced a half-megaton explosion, which amply demonstrated America’s nuclear virtuosity. The scientific and engineering portents of the tests were enormous: The United States could reasonably expect to increase the number and yield of its nuclear weapons while reducing their size. Although the Soviet Union tested its first fusion weapon in 1953, it fell behind in the nuclear arms competition.
As the principal instrument of both deterrence and general war offensive power against Russia, the Air Force, especially the Strategic Air Command, profited most from the rearmament program. When the Korean War mobilization fell into balance with the long-range program in fiscal year 1952, the Air Force received a third more funds ($20.6 billion) than the Army ($13.2 billion) and the Navy ($12.6 billion). The Air Force broke through its 70-wing program, creating 95 wings and winning theoretical approval of eventual expansion to 143 wings.14 A third of the wings belonged to SAC,
which doubled its personnel and aircraft in two years. In 1952 SAC put its first all-jet bomber, the B-47, into operation. To handle its expanded force and complicate Soviet targeting, SAC dispersed its forces from nineteen to thirty bases in the continental United States and from one to eleven bases abroad. In part dictated by the short range of the B-47 and the requirement for forward-based refuelers, the development of overseas bases in England and Morocco (and soon Spain and Libya) further committed the nation to a policy of forward, collective defense. SAC’s targeting doctrine reflected the growing complexity of its missions. Initially it had focused upon military-industrial targets related to Russia’s war-making potential. By 1953 it also had to target Soviet nuclear forces and weapons facilities and the Soviet air and ground forces that threatened NATO. As a series of strategic-scientific study groups reported, the proliferation of Soviet nuclear forces multiplied the target list and the number of aircraft and bombs SAC would need to make retaliation both a credible threat and plausible instrument for war fighting.
Although SAC received priority in funding, the rest of the Air Force expanded its role as the nation’s first line of defense during the Korean War era. One high-level study, Project VISTA, concluded that the defense of Europe required a NATO force of 10,000 tactical aircraft, some nuclear-capable, to offset ground forces inferiority. This concern allowed the Air Force to increase to 106 planned wings in 1953. In addition, other studies convinced Truman that the nation required a real air-defense system to counter the Soviet bomber threat. In 1951 the Air Force created Air Defense Command to develop an integrated system of interceptors, antiaircraft artillery and missiles, and radar warning. After much internal debate and scientific analysis, Truman in 1952 ordered the Air Force to construct a distant early warning (DEW) radar line across the top of the North American continent. Although pessimistic about its ability to stop Russian bombers from hitting American cities, the Air Force pursued the air-defense mission primarily as a means for protecting its SAC bases from a disarming first strike. The logic of the era, whether it started with the defense of NATO or air defense, always ended with a critical role for SAC’s bombers.
Complementing the strengthening of SAC and the extension of its protection to Europe, the Truman administration struck hard and fast to turn NATO into a formidable military alliance in 1950–1952. Truly alarmed at the prospect of additional Communist invasions, Truman, Acheson, Marshall, Bradley, and most of their advisers developed by the end of 1950 a comprehensive program for NATO and formed an effective trans-Atlantic political alliance with most of NATO’s senior statesmen. The NATO rearmers had five goals: Appoint an American as supreme military commander in Europe (SACEUR) and allow him to develop plans for an integrated NATO force; send more American forces to Europe; accelerate military assistance to the NATO nations; develop a forward strategy for defense at the borders of divided Germany; and create within NATO a West German army of twelve divisions. It was a large menu, and even the Americans sometimes disagreed on the method and timing for accomplishing their goals. Although the particulars of German rearmament brought the program to a temporary pause in 1953, the alliance had eighteen months of breathless accomplishment.
In December 1950 Truman nominated General Dwight D. Eisenhower to be the first SACEUR, a nomination hailed in Europe since the general brought vast experience and international prestige to the command. Truman also indicated that he would send more troops to Europe, and Acheson led a successful move to commit the NATO governments in principle to German rearmament. The prospect of sending more troops abroad set off a “great debate” in Congress that allowed isolationist Republicans to vent their ire but not stop the troops. Truman accepted a weak congressional prohibition that he could not send more than four divisions without further approval. By February 1951 the debate was over, and the Army began to move four divisions, which brought the 7th U.S. Army in Germany to six divisions. The United States example was followed by Great Britain, but France proved a reluctant ally. Although France was willing to risk a rearmed Germany if the Germans were integrated into a European Defense Community (EDC) structure, its foreign policy condemned ten divisions to service in Indochina, which left only nine in Europe. After the outbreak of the Korean War the Truman administration extended its aid to the French military effort in the Far East, in part to fight a two-front war against the Asian Communists, in part to subsidize a larger French NATO force and buy off French resistance to German rearmament. The policy was not an unvarnished success.
In the meantime, American policy toward Europe became increasingly linked to the carrot of military assistance. To the dismay of some State Department planners, the Truman administration sponsored a Mutual Security Act (1951), which severed economic aid from military assistance and put the administration of military assistance in the hands of the independent Mutual Security Agency. The reorganization eventually passed military aid into the hands of the Department of Defense, which used the Mutual Defense Assistance Program (MDAP) to influence foreign policy. Distributing over $20 billion in MDAP funds in 1951–1953, the United States championed the admission of Greece and Turkey into NATO in 1951 and improved diplomatic relations with fascist Spain and socialist Yugoslavia. None of these four nations was a military power, but they had attractive basing possibilities and gave NATO a southern frontier that might complicate Russian planning.
With General Eisenhower’s planners hard at work, the Truman administration set progressively higher goals for NATO’s forces. In September 1951 the Atlantic Council approved a forty-three-division force by 1954 and then escalated the alliance’s plan five months later. In the Lisbon Agreement (February 1952) the NATO ministers set a 1954 goal of 10,000 aircraft and eighty-nine divisions, half of which would be combat-ready. Such heady plans had torn loose of political and economic reality, but by 1953—even without the Germans—NATO could field twenty-five active divisions, fifteen in central Europe, and 5,200 aircraft dispersed to around 100 airfields. In two years NATO had become at least equal to the Soviet forces deployed in East Germany.
The West German rearmament plan, however, remained unfulfilled. The enthusiasm of the French National Assembly did not match the vision of the statesmen who saw NATO as the foundation of a united Europe. Instead, the leaders of the Fourth Republic hoped to wedge more military assistance and other concessions from the United States in exchange for approving the EDC treaty. West German rearmers, led by Konrad Adenauer, did not relish assigning their troops to NATO without the right to conduct their own foreign relations and create their own national military establishment. Negotiations over the terms of German rearmament dragged on past the end of the Korean War.
For all the confusion created by programs that mixed war waging, long-range rearmament, and strategic deterrence, the United States used the passing crisis of Korea to close the gap between the rhetoric of containment and its actual military capacity. Critics of the “militarization” of American diplomacy believed the rearmament policy was an exaggerated reaction to an overestimated Soviet threat. But the Russia of 1950–1953 was Stalin’s domain, and conventional wisdom gave Moscow the power to control its Communist collaborators in Europe and Asia. The Truman administration, buffeted at home by its political enemies and growing disillusionment over the war, had won a lasting victory for the Free World.
Korea: Settling for an Armistice
In 1951 United Nations Command won but could not end the Korean War. Guided by the revised war aims of the Truman administration and the Security Council, the UN international army restored the geographic integrity of the Republic of Korea by launching an offensive that captured the dominant terrain necessary to frustrate any further Communist attacks. After a false start at armistice negotiations in the summer of 1951, the Communists returned to the peace table, in part as a tactic to demoralize and divide the UN allies, in part to buy time to restore the shattered Chinese expeditionary force. Satisfied that his forces had established a line they could hold, General Ridgway, Ma
cArthur’s replacement as supreme commander, shifted to the strategic and tactical defense in November. Only another year and a half of war along a relatively static front made the UN accomplishment seem less than a victory.
In sustained, bitter fighting EUSAK—a force of seven American, one Commonwealth, and ten ROK divisions—won the war in 1951 the hard way. Although the Communist and UN forces in 1951 both numbered roughly half a million men, the Chinese and Koreans put more combat troops into the lines, and they fought hard in their massive spring offensive and on the defensive for the rest of 1951. Blessed with massive artillery and close air support, EUSAK nevertheless had to best the Communists in close infantry combat, and it did so. Shifting to the offensive in June, the UN divisions bludgeoned the Communists back across the 38th Parallel everywhere but in the extreme west, a militarily insignificant area. In consultation with the JCS and his field commander, Lieutenant General James Van Fleet, Ridgway established a defensive zone labeled the KANSAS-WYOMING line that he wanted EUSAK to hold. The key to establishing this line was a network of valleys and high ridges that dominated the terrain just north of the 38th Parallel in central Korea, an area designated “the Iron Triangle.” Using primarily the American 2d Infantry and 1st Marine Divisions, EUSAK wrested the Triangle from the Communists in a series of wearing battles that took their names from the moonscape mountains: The “Punchbowl,” “Bloody Ridge,” and “Heartbreak Ridge.” Divisions to the east and west reached the KANSAS-WYOMING line with somewhat less difficulty.
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