Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  “The Politburo deduced that Washington might want to select the PLA’s bases and troop concentrations in the Northeast as the priority targets for a U.S. nuclear strike. The Soviet Union had vital interests in the Northeast, thanks to the secret agreements reached in February, and .Moscow would have to retaliate in order to protect its own bases in Lushun and other places. The high command restated its conviction that the Americans would have to weigh possible Soviet retaliation when they pondered the pros and cons of a nuclear strike against China.

  “The foregoing arguments mostly concerned an attack on China proper, but the advocates of action [i.e., intervention] also argued that the United States would not resort to nuclear weapons in Korea either. The Chinese forces were experienced in mobile and guerrilla warfare; they could scatter and hide, as indeed they did prior to their massive intervention in October. After entering Korea, they could take cover in strong, concealed fortifications, and the Chinese believed that the role of tactical nuclear weapons in the mountainous battlefields of Korea would be limited. Finally, the Chinese and UN forces would be confronting each other in what was called jigsaw pattern warfare.’ … In this confusing and ever changing battlefield, the Americans could not avoid hitting themselves.”

  46. Ibid., pp. 174–180.

  47. Wehrfritz, “History Lesson,” p. 30; Goncharov, Lewis and Xue, Uncertain Partners, pp. 180–185.

  China understood that the war in Korea—like the later Vietnam War—was a “proxy war,” Cumings observes (Origins II, p. 763)—“with the Chinese revolution being the real issue.”

  48. Goncharov, Lewis and Xue, Uncertain Partners, tells the astonishing tale of this turn of events on pp. 187–199.

  49. Hankuk Ilbo, November 16, 1990.

  50. Goncharov, Lewis and Xue, Uncertain Partners, p. 199.

  David Halberstam observes that American China experts “predicted accurately what China would do, not based on Communist intentions”—i.e., the policies of a supposedly .Moscow-dominated bloc—“but on Chinese history.” However, because they had been discredited by .McCarthy and others, “the State Department did not heed their warnings on what American moves would bring the Chinese into the war. The warnings unheeded, the Chinese entered, and the anti-Communist passions against the China experts mounted. It was a Greek thing” (Best and the Brightest [see chap. 4, n. 69], pp. 108, 118).

  51. Newly released Russian documents quoted in “Kim Il-sung Masterminded Korean War,” Korea Times, July 21, 1994.

  Mao’s longtime personal physician quotes his patient as having confided that he had asked Stalin to intervene as well, arguing that American conquest of Korea would threaten both China and the USSR. But Stalin, arguing that it would be the beginning of the Third World War, refused, Mao complained. Thereupon the Chinese leader asked Stalin to give or—if Stalin feared such aid would provoke the West—at least sell China weapons it could use to intervene. Stalin agreed only to a sale, and some 90 percent of munitions China used in the war came from Moscow—financed by loans totaling $1.3 billion (Dr. Li Zhizui, The Private Life of Chairman Mao [New York: Random House, 1994], pp. 117–118, 643).

  52. Hankuk Ilbo, November 17, 1990.

  53. Goncharov, Lewis and Xue, Uncertain Partners, on page 191 translate this passage, which they describe as having been left out of Khrushchev’s “Korean War” as published in English.

  54. As Yu Song-chol and Pak Hon-yong returned from their Beijing trip, they watched advance units of the Chinese forces crossing into North Korea. Yu recalled, “The Chinese ’were crossing the border with all of the military equipment loaded on handcarts, with three people pulling in front and two people pushing from the rear. This scene showed us the fighting potential of the Chinese forces” (Hankuk Ilbo, November 16, 1990).

  55. Among those who were delighted to be recalled was my father. After spending 1942 to 1945 as a flight-test engineer on the plant’s newly built B-29s, he had found himself grounded in peacetime as a Dodge truck salesman.

  56. Origins II, p. 774.

  57. Baik II, pp. 341–349.

  58. “The Armistice was greeted with relief and approval by the people of North Korea. The strains and privations of the war—incessant bombing, prolonged fear, extended working hours, food shortages, and loss of relatives—had resulted in widespread ‘war-weariness’ (yomjonjuui, literally “hate war–ism”). During the conflict, however, there had developed a striking ambivalence in attitudes toward military violence: on the one hand, it was abhorred; on the other, it was welcomed since it might bring quick victory to one of the antagonists and the end of mass killing” (Glenn D. Paige and Dong Jun Lee, “The Post-War Politics of Communist Korea,” in Robert A. Scalapino, ed., North Korea Today [see chap. 3, n. 11], pp. 18–19). Lee, a defector to South Korea, evidently of Soviet-Korean background, is described as having been “a writer for Pravda in Pyongyang for four years until February 1959.”

  59. Halliday and Cumings, Korea, pp. 88, 121. “Contrary to what is generally suggested, Truman’s remarks were not a faux pas; they were a carefully weighed threat based on contingency planning to use the bomb. The crisis in Korea led to intense high-level discussions about the possible use of, or a threat to use, what Washington liked to call ‘weapons of mass destruction’: atomic and chemical weapons.” In December, right after British Prime Minister Clement Atlee visited him and won the President’s oral assurances that he would not use the A-bomb in Korea, “Truman secretly moved non-assembled bombs to an aircraft-carrier off Korea and later, equally secretly, carried out dummy nuclear runs over North Korea” (pp. 123–124). “US policy-making was treading a razor’s edge over atomic weapons. It would seem that the USA came closest to using them in early spring 1951. On 10 .March MacArthur asked for something he called a ‘D Day atomic capability.’ At the end of March atomic-bomb-loading pits on Okinawa were operational; the bombs were ostensibly carried there unassembled and put together at the base. It is not clear whether the bombs were assembled and ready for use. But on 5 April the Joint Chiefs ordered immediate atomic retaliation against Manchurian bases if large numbers of new troops came into the fighting, or, it appears, if bombers were launched from there against American forces; and on 6 April Truman issued an order approving the Joint Chiefs’ request and the transfer of a limited number of complete atomic weapons ‘to military custody’ ” (p. 155).

  60. Halliday and Cumings (ibid., p. 160) say that in early June of 1951 U.S. Defense Secretary George Marshall “is reported to have said that he would recommend to Truman that they tell the Chinese leaders … that unless the fighting stopped ‘we are going to give them a taste of the atom.’” The suggestion seems to be that such a message might have been passed to the Chinese, disposing them toward negotiations—which began the following month. The authors add (pp. 163–164): “The first tests of tactical nuclear weapons had been held in January 1951. In June that year the Joint Chiefs again considered using the bomb, this time in tactical battle circumstances. Robert Oppenheimer was involved in

  Project Vista,’ designed to gauge the feasibility of the tactical use of atomic weapons. On 5 July 1951, in the interval between the agreement to start peace talks and their actual opening, the Army Operations Division produced a memorandum recommending the use of the bomb if there was a deadlock in the talks. In the meantime it recommended field tests. Korea was the obvious place for these. In September and October 1951, while the peace talks were suspended over violations of the neutral zone and during the fiercest land battle of the war between US and North Korean troops, on Height 1211/Heartbreak Ridge, the USA carried out ‘Operation Hudson Harbor’ in conditions of utmost secrecy. Lone B-29 bombers flew over North Korea on simulated atomic-bombing runs, dropping dummy atomic bombs or heavy TNT bombs. … [T]he project indicated that the bombs were probably not useful (for purely tactical reasons).”

  61. See Baik II, pp. 252, 266.

  Halliday and Cumings argue that “these negotiations were an immense breakthrough for North
Korea and China. … This was a double psychological victory: over the USA because Americans were negotiating with people they did not ‘recognize’ and over the South Koreans, who were subordinate to the USA” (Korea, p. 160).

  62. Clark, From the Danube to the Yalu (see chap. 1, n. 1), p. 82.

  63. Halliday and Cumings, Korea, p. 200. The Chinese figures are particularly murky. Halliday and Cumings say that one source estimates the Chinese dead at 3 million. Other sources say that even the 1 million figure refers to total casualties, not deaths. See, e.g., Kim, Truth About the Korean War, p. 42.

  64. That is an achievement whose value became clearer to him and many others after the South had progressed, providing its people prosperity and substantial personal and political freedom, than it had been at the time. From the early 1950s to 1987, Western policy makers repeatedly had to make excuses for not-very-nice South Korean governments while seeking to portray the Demilitarized Zone as “Freedom’s Frontier.”

  65. See, e.g., .Mark Clark, From the Danube, p. 85.

  66. Goulden, Korea, pp. 471–472.

  67. Robert F Futrell, The United States Air Force in Korea, 1950–53 (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1961), p. 648, cited in Rosemary Foot, A Substitute for Victory: The Politics of Peacemaking at the Korean Armistice Talks (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 207.

  68. See Goncharov, Lewis and Xue, Uncertain Partners, p. 188.

  69. See Baik II, pp. 342, 399.

  70. Ibid., p. 339.

  71. Kim, With the Century (see chap. 1, n. 1), vol. 3, pp. 333–334.

  72. Halliday and Cumings write: “Most Western sources suggest that the guerrillas were a short-lived phenomenon that soon dwindled away. This is not true.” They consider guerrilla warfare to have been “the most important factor characterizing the nature of the conflict” (Korea, p. 146).

  73. Baik II, pp. 381–382.

  74. Ibid., pp. 399, 403.

  75. See Deane, I Was a Captive, p. 17, regarding South Korean soldiers’ arrogance; p. 79, regarding drunkenness and looting on the part of North Korean soldiers; pp. 96 ff. regarding capture and imprisonment of South Korean politicians; p. 223 regarding conscriptions of young South Koreans.

  76. Hastings, Korean War, p. 132.

  The U.S. diplomat Harold Noble (Embassy at War, p. 205) wrote that Koreans and Americans returning to Seoul in 1950 after the Northern occupiers withdrew for the first time found the bodies of South Koreans “trussed up and shot through the head. … Bodies were so numerous, especially lying in alleys just off the main streets, that their removal and burial was a major problem.”

  77. Higgins, War in Korea, pp. 209–211.

  78. Weathersby “Limits to Revisionist Interpretations” (see chap. 4, n. 30).

  79. Choi Yearn-hong, “Korean War.”

  80. Cumings writes (Origins II, p. 671), “About sixty members of the National Assembly remained in Seoul, and toward the end of July, forty-eight of them held a meeting expressing their allegiance to the DPRK.” The decision of moderates to remain in Seoul, Cumings says (p. 495), “has a retrospective eloquence” regarding Northern efforts to woo them.

  The American diplomat Harold Noble made a study of the North Korean occupation, interviewing some Seoul residents who escaped south after the occupation was under way and many more of them after the South Korean and American forces had returned to Seoul. Regarding the 210-member National Assembly, Noble calculated that those members who stayed behind numbered about thirty-eight. He concluded that, although “a few of them appear to have been somewhat sympathetic to the communist cause, I’m convinced that most of them ’were not but simply became confused that last day, remembered their resolution never to desert the people, and stayed behind until it was too late. The communists picked up a few of the most leftist among them very quickly, and took them to Pyongyang, but left the rest alone for about ten days.” Then the authorities brought those more than thirty remaining members in for a speech (telling one that his situation was like that of “a rat in a jar”), placed them under surveillance and later brought them back for interrogation. “None of them appears to have been heroic in refusing to sign confessions of crimes against the people, although in fairness I must add that those I’ve talked with assured me they had no doubt of an early UN and ROK victory and reoccupation of Seoul, and believed that if they could keep alive in the interim it wouldn’t matter what they signed. … On three occasions, when the communist captors presented documents for their signature, these assemblymen signed. Two were petitions to the Security Council of the United Nations protesting against UN and US action in Korea. One of these men has told me he knew he had to sign, so he did, but he didn’t bother to read the document.” Some members were asked to broadcast propaganda speeches. “One little man who doesn’t possess a great deal of physical courage cleverly agreed to their invitation knowing he would be turned down. He removed and hid his false teeth, and when the radio technicians heard him mumbling his prepared speech they said he wouldn’t do.” Among others, “some of the ablest promptly agreed to broadcast after being shown the blunt end of a pistol or the open blade of a knife.” The occupation study is summarized in two manuscript chapters, “Seoul Under the Communists” and “Communist Last Days in Seoul,” which were not included when Noble’s Embassy at War was published posthumously. I am grateful to Mrs. Noble for kindly providing copies and permitting me to quote from the manuscript chapters.

  81. Higgins, War in Korea, pp. 209–211.

  Noble (“Seoul Under the Communists”) wrote that the first occupation was “so bitter a lesson that although nearly the whole population stayed behind in June, 1950, the next winter when it appeared that Seoul would be captured again by the communists, despite the snow and ice and bitter cold, well over a million people left the city and scarcely a hundred thousand remained a second time. …”

  82. Scalapino and Lee write that, as the war came to an end, South Korea was “one of the most staunchly anti-Communist societies in the world. On the other hand, every speech and action of the North Korean officials reflected their deep anxiety regarding the loyalty of their own people and the deplorable conditions prevailing throughout their country” (Communism in Korea, p. 462).

  Cumings (Origins II, p. 669) acknowledges that South Koreans retained horrible memories of the Northern occupation, but he questions whether their memories were true ones: “In the early days of the new regime, the released prisoners settled scores with their antagonists who had abused and jailed them, mainly members of the Korean National Police and the rightist youth groups. People’s courts arraigned and denounced them, after which summary executions took place. This experience has led to a general judgment, reinforced by American propaganda, that the occupation of the south was a living hell for those who experienced it. I myself seem always to be running into Koreans who say the experience was terrible, while also saying they successfully hid out during the entire three months. Evidence from the time, including interviews with ROK officials who fled Seoul, does not suggest that the occupation was politically onerous for the majority of Seoul’s citizens, although generalized fear, food shortages and the American bombing made it an often hellish experience.”

  83. Higgins, War in Korea, pp. 209–211.

  84. Halliday and Cumings, Korea, p. 143.

  85. Ibid., p. 132.

  86. The communists’ redistribution was carried out “in every province outside the Pusan perimeter; although it was hasty and done in wartime conditions, it cleared away class structures and power that later made possible Rhee’s land-redistribution programme—because the Americans would not fight merely to restore land to this class that had ruled Korea for centuries” (Halliday and Cumings, Korea, p. 87). Also see Cumings, Origins II, pp. 471–472 and, especially, p. 760, where the author observes that the war “transformed South Korea; it was the partial equivalent of the revolution its social structure demanded but did not get in the previous five years. The revolution was ca
pitalist and the war foreshortened and hastened it, above all by ending landlordism.”

  87. Gregory Henderson, “Korea, 1950,” in James Cotton and Ian Neary eds., The Korean War in History (.Manchester: .Manchester University Press, 1989), pp. 175–176. In the Seoul of 1948, in contrast, Henderson wrote, “those leaning northward and those serving the south had then a kind of intimacy they no longer have. One was not quite so abruptly communist or anti-communist then. There was middle ground. All of the [South Korean security forces’] officers personally knew those who had either chosen the other side or leaned in some way toward it. Nor had they always disliked them. The fact that the—as we say in the United States—‘Southern way of life’ was a little more on the collabora-tory side while the North was steelier, more Spartan, more hard-bitten, more ideological and less yielding and opportunistic, all this was known and recognized although not usually thus baldly articulated.”

  88. Baik II, p. 315.

  One film, according to an official description, told of Jo Ok-hi, a woman party member who joined a partisan force opposing the occupying UN troops in her county. American troops supposedly captured her and “subjected her to every kind of torture in an attempt to wring out of her secrets about the partisan detachment. They pulled out all her fingernails. But the enemy always got the same answers: ‘You fools! No one gets secrets from a Workers’ Party member!’ The bloodthirsty U.S. cannibals … gouged out her eyeballs, burned her with a red hot iron and cut off her breasts” (History of the Just War for the Liberation of the Fatherland of the Korean People [Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961], pp. 133–134, cited by Kiwon Chung, “The North Korean People’s Army and the Party,” in Scalapino, Korea Today, p. 117).