For the Common Defense

by Allan R. Millett, Peter Maslowski

  With a valor and skill that reached the highest standards seen during World War II, the American and other UN troops destroyed the myth of PLA invincibility, inflicting casualties in a ratio over ten to one. Even the ROK divisions showed a higher degree of professionalism as hard experience weeded out incompetent officers and trained the enlisted men. So fearsome had EUSAK become in the autumn of 1951 that Van Fleet believed he could hammer the Communists deeper into North Korea, but American policy did not anticipate a return to the reunification campaign of 1950. Instead the Truman administration allowed Ridgway to respond to a Soviet ceasefire proposal in June 1951 by opening direct negotiations with the Communists at Kaesong in July. The talks produced nothing but a presentation of extreme positions and propaganda parry and thrust, and the fighting continued until more Communist battlefield defeats brought on serious truce talks in November.

  The rebirth of EUSAK in 1951 came from the converging influence of many mobilization policies and battlefield reforms. EUSAK benefited from the charismatic leadership of Matthew B. Ridgway and the solid professionalism of James Van Fleet. The test of battle eliminated the less effective corps, division, and regimental commanders, who could be replaced with proven leaders with World War II experience. Once past the emergency days of 1950, EUSAK incorporated well-trained and intelligent draftees and reserves into its combat units; it also improved performance by eliminating all-black units and making itself the first fully integrated combat formation in American history. As industrial mobilization hit full effectiveness, EUSAK received ammunition and weapons in quality and quantity that offset the Russian materiel supplied the Asian Communists and blunted the Chinese-Korean manpower superiority in the front lines. At the same time, the infusion of American advisers and equipment, especially more artillery, brought the ROK divisions to progressively higher levels of military efficiency. Part of the frustration of the Korean War stemmed from the fact that the front-line troops and their commanders believed they could have accomplished more than they were asked.

  UN Command’s air campaign, marked by geographic limitations and frustrations, contributed to the success of the allied war effort. In terms of offensive missions, the Far East Air Forces (FEAF) performed three major tasks: Air superiority, interdiction, and close air support. Except for the war’s opening months, the UNC did not worry about enemy air attacks on its troops and installations, although occasional Communist planes slipped through on night attacks. Instead, the F-86 “Saber” jets of 5th Air Force, FEAF’s major combat command, prowled the skies above North Korea, assigned the mission of destroying the Communists’ interceptor force. The Communists’ threat was substantial, since they kept about 1,000 MiG-15 jets deployed to bases along either side of the Yalu. With the exception of occasional MiG surges against UNC bombers, the F-86s kept the skies free for UN operations. Normally outnumbered three or two to one during air combat, the F-86s mastered the MiGs through greater pilot experience, tactics, teamwork, and sturdier aircraft. The MiG had excellent high-speed and high-altitude handling characteristics, but the Communist pilots, including hundreds of Russians, avoided combat far from their bases. In air battles FEAF jets downed 589 MiGs at a cost of 78 Sabres. The Air Force would have preferred to attack the MiG bases in China, where American airmen watched the MiGs flock up to “MiG Alley,” but the Truman administration would not widen the war unless UNC air superiority was truly menaced. It was not.

  Limited to targets within Korea, FEAF concentrated on interdicting the battlefield, destroying enemy units, equipment, and supplies before they reached the front. Air attacks in 1950 against both the NKPA and the PLA blunted the Communist offensives. The major interdiction effort began when the front stabilized along the 38th Parallel. Estimating that the Communists required 2,400 tons of supplies a day—and even more for sustained offensive operations—FEAF planners mounted Operation STRANGLE in early 1951, a maximum attack upon the North Korean railway system. Ten months of sustained attacks on bridges, tunnels, marshaling yards, and other choke points along the rail routes did not “strangle” the Communists, who responded with a massive railroad repair effort. The Communists also increased their truck and porter carrying capacity to offset their loss of 12,000 locomotives and railcars. UNC pilots sang “We’ve Been Working on the Railroad”; the Communists presumably could have sung the same refrain as they filled the craters, cleared the wreckage, and relaid the track. The UNC pilots also patrolled the highways, which became jammed with trucks after nightfall. The technology and techniques for night attacks did not match the Communist motorized effort; UNC pilots claimed 82,000 vehicles destroyed, but the supplies kept coming. Although FEAF dropped the name STRANGLE, it did not stop the campaign of air interdiction pressure. Its aircraft flew twice as many interdiction sorties as they did air superiority and close air support missions, and Air Force and Marine squadrons lost 816 of the 1,041 aircraft downed in action to groundfire. Naval aviation also participated in the campaign, flying from the carriers of Task Force 77 and losing 564 aircraft in the effort. In the war’s last year FEAF received permission to broaden its target list, and it attacked the North Korean hydroelectric and irrigation dams with considerable success. The Communists howled about “genocidal” air attacks, a refrain picked up by other Third World nations and faint-hearted Europeans. The economic attacks came to a halt through political pressure, but also because North Korea had so few such vulnerable targets. To have been truly effective, interdiction would have had to reach into China and Asian Russia.

  American aviators also provided EUSAK with close air support—i.e., air strikes against enemy troops and weapons engaged with friendly ground troops. The Air Force did not relish such missions because they required trained air control parties on the ground to put the bombs on target and not on friendly troops; such parties, the Air Force argued, demanded aviation personnel it could not spare. Air Force doctrine stressed the use of airborne spotter aircraft and limiting strikes to 1,000 yards from friendly troops. The 1st Marine Aircraft Wing and Navy attack squadrons, however, followed practices developed for amphibious warfare and delivered close strikes with a precision that gladdened the hearts of UNC infantrymen. Along a stabilized front, close air strikes also required precision artillery fire in order to suppress flak; such fire-support coordination demanded intimate air-ground collaboration, not common between EUSAK and FEAF. Marine and naval aviation assumed much of the burden for close air support for all EUSAK, but after 1950 UNC limited close air support sorties to an average of ninety-six a day, or about eight per division. Army and Marine ground commanders did not regard the sortie rate as adequate.

  The close air support issue assumed even greater importance as the Army and Marine Corps introduced helicopters to combat for the first time during the Korean War. The limited size and power of 1950 helos limited their use to reconnaissance and casualty evacuation missions until the Marine Corps began troop-carrying missions in 1951 with its Sikorsky HRS-1, which could carry eight combat infantrymen. By 1952 helos had become a common sight above UNC’s positions, but the concept of the vertical envelopment assault against defended positions went untested.

  Battered by UNC ground and air assault, the Communists met the UN military negotiators at Panmunjom in November 1951 and opened the sustained, often acrimonious bargaining that eventually brought an armistice in July 1953. In four months of intense talks, the negotiators shaped an agreement, largely by identifying the provisions they would not accept. They agreed that they would establish a Demilitarized Zone along the line of contact when the fighting ended; both sides would have responsibilities and rights for inspecting the DMZ. The Communists, however, would accept few provisions for inspections beyond the DMZ and no formal limits on the forces stationed in North Korea. In light of Communist intransigence, UN Command rejected most provisions limiting the stationing of foreign troops in South Korea, and American planners had to accept the implications of the proposed truce: A massive buildup of the South Korean armed forces
and the permanent stationing of American units in Korea. Nevertheless, the Truman administration, under intense pressure from its UN allies to end the war, decided it could accept a mere ceasefire, even if the Communist military threat remained immediate. The negotiating barrier to peace in early 1952 became the disposition of prisoners of war, a problem UNC underestimated because it did not view the issue from the same perspective as the Communists.

  To UN Command, POWs were war’s unfortunates, but to the Communists they were instruments of combat. The Communists had every reason to regard the POW issue as an important propaganda issue. When UNC surveyed the 170,000 Chinese and Koreans in its hands, it estimated that half of them would not be repatriated voluntarily, an enormous embarrassment to the Communists. UNC held fast to the principle of voluntary repatriation. In the meantime, the Communist high command infiltrated organizers into UNC camps to intimidate the nonrepatriators and harass their guards; a full-scale revolt on the island of Koje-do in May 1952 ended in combat operations and discomfited UNC. The Communists showed a similar callousness in handling UNC prisoners. Of the estimated 7,245 Americans who may have fallen into Communist hands, only 3,800 returned. As many as 600 may have been murdered, while 2,806 died of illness under degrading conditions. Communist POW administrators used turncoats to control the POWs, and political officers extracted confessions of germ warfare and other alleged atrocities, largely from airmen, by direct physical and mental torture. Political indoctrination (“brainwashing”) sessions were common for all captives. The full nature of Communist POW treatment, of course, could not be investigated until the POWs returned, for escapes from the Communist camps were impossible for weak prisoners who found no assistance beyond the wire. UNC personnel attempted hundreds of escapes, but none succeeded. The Communists faced an even larger charge: Where were some 250,000 Korean soldiers and civilians under Communist control who disappeared during the war?

  The most important strategic factor that delayed an armistice agreement, however, was the post-truce ability of the two rival Koreas to defend themselves against each other. The United States and China had one interest in common: They did not intend to keep large armies in Korea forever. The Chinese answer was to dig into North Korea’s mountains and create fortified positions miles deep along the DMZ and both coasts. Hailed as the underground equivalent of the Great Wall, the barrier systems could check amphibious envelopments and the use of nuclear weapons. The Chinese completed their digging in the summer of 1953. For the United States the focus stayed on the enlargement and improvement of the ROK army, planned for twenty divisions on a troop base of 500,000 soldiers, or five times its 1950 strength. By the summer of 1953 the JCS judged the ROK army (at sixteen divisions) capable enough to defend the South Korean border with two or three UNC divisions and U.S. air and naval support.

  Stalin’s death in March 1953 accelerated the peace process because his successors-in-committee wanted the war, a drain on Soviet defense spending, ended and told Mao Zedong and Kim Il-sung to get an armistice in 1953. The Communists soon accepted a UN plan to allow POWs to refuse repatriation. The barrier now was Syngman Rhee, who thought a divided Korea, occupied in part by Chinese troops, would never survive. His tacit cooperation required more military aid, a $1 billion economic assistance package, a mutual defense alliance, and U.S. sponsorship as a UN member. It was a good deal at the time.

  The war also continued along the Main Line of Resistance (MLR) established in the winter of 1951–1952. Although UNC and Communist numbers throughout Korea were comparable (700,000 to 900,000), the Communists enjoyed a trench advantage of two to one and used their manpower, improved artillery support, and the advantages of night and surprise to carry the battle to UNC. In many respects the fighting of 1952–1953 resembled the trench warfare of World War I without the “big pushes.” The MLR and its combat outposts became warrens of trenches, bunkers, barbed wire, mines, and heavy-weapons positions. Firing an average of a million shells a month, UNC artillery helped hold back the Communist probes. The war was a siege, with the Communists most anxious to dig and tunnel up to the outposts along the Iron Triangle and north of the Imjin River. UNC beat back most of the Chinese attacks, but tactical commanders, reluctant to risk lives, often underestimated the situation and committed units piecemeal, normally protracting the battles and ruining the units actually fighting. This tactical pattern did not inspire UNC soldiers, especially when recaptured terrain was eventually abandoned. Between the promise of the peace talks and the prospect of individual rotation, the morale of American combat units slipped, but UNC as a whole—bolstered by the professionalism of UN troops and improved ROK performance—held fast until the armistice.

  Between the autumn of 1952 and the spring of 1953 the international context of the Korean War shifted, pointing the way to a ceasefire. In the 1952 presidential elections the Republican candidate, Dwight D. Eisenhower, won handily, in part on the promise that he would investigate the war. Once in office, Ike sent signals to the Communists that he might widen the conflict with Nationalist Chinese reinforcements and nuclear-capable aircraft deployed to Okinawa. Stalin’s death in March 1953 may have softened Soviet ardor when the surviving leaders turned to their rivalries and internal problems; in Asia the Communists were close to victory in Indochina and did not need a wider war in Korea. In political terms the principal American problem became convincing the hard-bitten Rhee government to accept a peace, for Rhee feared a sellout. He softened his resistance when he received guarantees of increased military assistance, the presence of American troops, and a mutual security treaty with the United States. Of the negotiating issues, the Communists finally accepted the reality of voluntary repatriation, managed by an international commission. Rhee encouraged their cooperation by ordering his guards to turn loose 27,000 North Korean prisoners. In any event—in the midst of some of the heaviest action along the MLR—the truce talks moved rapidly, and the belligerents finally agreed to an armistice on July 27, 1953. With few emotions beyond relief and exhaustion, UNC troops along the MLR ceased fire—but held their positions with loaded weapons.

  The Korean War marked a major turning point in post-1945 American military policy. It provided the political context for rearmament and the development of NATO. It also drew the United States into a more active military role in Asia, which now joined Europe as part of the Free World system of collective, forward defense. During the course of the war or shortly after its conclusion, the United States entered mutual security agreements with Japan (which began its own rearmament), the Republic of Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand. More ominously, the Truman administration increased its support to the French war in Indochina, but it also demanded that the French develop Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam as autonomous states. The costs of the Korean War itself were not inconsequential. The American government spent around $40 billion to fight the war and sent over 2 million men to the war zone. Of these servicemen 33,741 died in action, and another 2,835 perished in the war zone. America’s allies, principally the South Koreans, had 61,000 killed in action, while the Communists lost between 1.5 and 2 million soldiers. If “limited” in the global sense, the war reached major proportions in north Asia. Only a later Asian war would diminish the legacy of the nation’s only major victory in a war with Communists.

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  SIXTEEN

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  Waging Cold War: American Defense Policy for Extended Deterrence and Containment, 1953–1965

  After the Korean War, the United States turned from a crisis-oriented military policy toward concepts and programs designed to last as long as the rivalry with the Soviet Union. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson adopted policies suited for “the long haul.” With Soviet-American competition accepted as the central fact in international relations, American policymakers regarded defense policy as a principal instrument for containing the parallel spread of Communism and Soviet imperialism. To check the extension of Soviet
influence, the United States sought to reduce the chance that the Russians would threaten or use military force as a tool of international influence. For all the debate about the means and costs of defense, American policy rested upon consensual assumptions about the nature of the military challenge and the appropriate response. Supported by an activist coalition in Congress, the three Cold War presidents further refined containment, strategic deterrence, and forward, collective defense.

  Nuclear weapons remained at the heart of American strategy. The era saw the extension of nuclear deterrence in both political and technological terms, for the changing nature of the Soviet threat, the requirements of alliance support, and the dazzling possibilities of technological change made the development of nuclear forces irresistible. By 1965 the United States and Soviet Union had both created the rudiments of the strategic “triad,” a force of intercontinental bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and submarines armed with intermediate-range ballistic missiles. These delivery systems bore warheads of increased destructive power, since they combined the explosive force of the hydrogen fusion process and improved missile accuracy. In raw numerical terms the United States enjoyed nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union, largely because of its sizable bomber force. The Soviet Union sought to counter this potential advantage by building a thick air-defense system of interceptors and missiles and by creating its own ICBMs, manned by the Strategic Rocket Forces (SRF). The direct threat to American nuclear forces and cities increased during the era. Acutely aware of this growing vulnerability, American policymakers tried to reduce the likelihood of general war by making deterrence more complex and awesome.