In early 1949, Rhee unsuccessfully sought U.S. backing for an invasion of the North, with the aim of taking it over. Kim had better luck with the Soviets. In early 1950, Stalin, after first rejecting the idea, agreed to support a North Korean invasion of the south, supplying military equipment and advice but not troops, with the expectation that, aided by communist uprisings in the south, the north would win a quick victory and the United States would not intervene.
In deciding to send U.S. ground troops to Korea, Truman sought to check what he and other policymakers saw as a Soviet probe of American will, believing, wrongly, that the Soviet Union had instigated the North Korean move. The United States cared less about the fate of Korea than the implications of the conflict for the larger Cold War. Dean Acheson, then serving as secretary of state, described Korea as a “vital . . . symbol,” a place where the United States had to demonstrate to its allies and enemies its determination to halt Soviet aggression or else face similar moves elsewhere. As in the earlier Iranian and Greek crises, a local conflict took on global dimensions because the United States saw it as test of strength between rival world blocs.
In Europe, in spite of the tension between the Soviet- and American-led camps, the border between them remained stable, essentially along the line where the Allied armies had met at the end of World War II. In Asia, by contrast, the demarcation between the communist and capitalist blocs remained ill-defined and shifting, as the political trajectories of decolonizing nations remained uncertain and the epic Chinese Civil War neared its end.
When the Chinese conflict had reignited after World War II, the Truman administration concluded that a communist victory could not be stopped, given the corruption, inefficiency, and unpopularity of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime. Accordingly, it gave only token aid to the anticommunist forces. When in 1949 the communists won control over all of mainland China, the administration found itself on the defensive. Chinese Nationalist supporters and conservative Republicans charged Truman with “losing” China. Many Americans, bewildered by the limits of their country’s power and the failure to fully use it, found seductive the argument made by administration critics that the communist victory had been the result of treachery by communist sympathizers within the Department of State.
The successful test by the Soviet Union of an atomic bomb in August 1949 contributed to the growing sense that the communists were gaining momentum. American leaders had realized that the Soviet Union would eventually develop atomic weapons, but it happened sooner than they anticipated. With any realistic expectation of effective international control of atomic weapons over, both the Truman administration and public opinion reacted to the unsettling news of the Soviet test by supporting a push to make sure that the United States maintained nuclear superiority. After a heated, secret debate among atomic scientists and government officials, in January 1950 Truman approved the development of a “Super” bomb (or hydrogen bomb, as it was later called) that would unleash the enormous power of thermonuclear fusion.
The Korean fighting set off a broad American mobilization. In addition to dispatching troops to the battlefront, Truman positioned the Seventh Fleet to prevent a Communist Chinese attack on Formosa, where the Nationalists had retreated. He also increased military assistance for the French effort to retain its colonies in Indochina and stepped up aid to the Philippine government, which was fighting a peasant insurgency.
Truman militarized American policy in Asia on his own authority. Nominally, U.S. forces in Korea acted under United Nations command, though in practice the UN commander, General Douglas MacArthur, operated as part of the American command structure, with the forces that sixteen countries sent to Korea (in most cases token units) reporting to him. After Congress had ratified the UN Charter, it passed legislation requiring its consent for the large-scale assignment of U.S. forces to UN peacekeeping missions, but the Truman administration ignored that procedure. Nor did Truman seek a declaration of war or a congressional resolution of support before committing U.S. forces to Korea, though no doubt he could have gotten one. Instead, he rested his action on his view of his inherent power as president, a step that, in seeming contradiction to the Constitution, shifted the authority to make war from the legislative branch—more susceptible to popular pressure—to the executive branch.
Senator Robert Taft criticized Truman’s failure to get a declaration of war, but in the heated atmosphere of the early days of the Korean fighting, the constitutional issues surrounding the commitment of American military force received scant attention. Months later, when Truman decided to send a large Army force to Europe without congressional approval, a debate did arise in Congress over his power to do so (impelled in part by Republicans who wanted to see a less Eurocentric national security policy). However, the Senate ultimately ratified Truman’s move, and the controversy had little lasting effect on the long-term shift in governance that had taken place. Since Korea, presidents have sent U.S. forces into battle many times, but never with a declaration of war, instead seeking weaker forms of congressional approval, or none at all.
The demobilization of the Army after World War II left the United States ill-equipped for a new ground war. To fight in Korea, the Army had to quickly call up reservists as well as deploy draftees. Many arrived with little training. Corporal Merwin Perkins, a nineteen-year-old Army reservist, who had never received basic training, found himself on the front lines in Korea “one month to the day” after leaving “civilian life in Minnesota.” “I didn’t even know how to dig a foxhole,” he later recalled. “A gunnery sergeant told me how. ‘Make it like a grave.’”
The sergeant’s comments no doubt reflected the grim situation in which the troops found themselves. The dispatching of U.S. forces failed to stop the North Korean advance until it came within thirty miles of the port city of Pusan, at the southern tip of the Korean peninsula. Only there, in very heavy fighting, did the Americans manage to establish a stable defensive perimeter. Then the tide turned. The failure of communist uprisings to take place in the south, a steady flow of American troops and supplies into Pusan, and heavy American bombing denied the North Koreans the quick victory they had expected.
In mid-September 1950, the UN forces launched a counterattack, pushing north from Pusan and carrying out an amphibious landing at Inchon, not far south of the 38th parallel. The North Koreans, faced with the possibility of being cut off in their rear, rapidly retreated. The UN phalanxes linked up on September 26 and two days later recaptured Seoul in street-by-street fighting.
Now the North Koreans faced catastrophic defeat. When the United States sent troops to Korea, its stated goal was to reestablish the preinvasion status. But as the fighting proceeded, high-ranking policymakers, like John Allison and Dean Rusk at the State Department, argued that the United States should use its military power to unify Korea under a noncommunist government. Shortly before the Inchon landing, Truman approved sending U.S. forces north of the 38th parallel, a step that won UN General Assembly approval on October 7, just as the line was being crossed.
The success of the UN offensive led Kim Il Sung to ask Stalin to bail out the failing North Korean effort with Soviet troops. Stalin declined but urged the Chinese to come to the North Koreans’ aid. The Chinese signaled several times that if U.S. troops crossed the 38th parallel, they would enter the war, but American military and civilian leaders ignored the warnings. Instead, giddy with success, MacArthur kept moving his forces north toward the Yalu River, which separated North Korea from China, unaware that the Chinese had begun moving large numbers of troops across the border. An American soldier who arrived in Korea in November remembered that “the mood was, we were going to get up to the Yalu and we were all going to be home by Christmas.”
In late November the Chinese launched a massive offensive that panicked UN troops, who retreated in disarray. Washington panicked too; Truman told reporters that if necessary the United States woul
d utilize every resource at its disposal in Korea, including atomic weapons, inaccurately stating that field commanders could authorize their use. In response, British prime minister Clement Attlee hastily flew to Washington for urgent discussions aimed at dissuading the United States from a full-scale war with China. (Britain had some fourteen thousand troops in Korea.) Cooler heads soon prevailed; when MacArthur sought permission to blockade the Chinese coast, bomb Chinese industry, and use National Chinese troops in Korea, his superiors turned him down.
By early 1951, Chinese troops had moved south across the 38th parallel and retaken Seoul. Within a month, though, the UN forces managed to stop the offensive, in part through the massive use of airpower. From the start of the war, the United States took advantage of its air supremacy to fly close tactical support and bomb North Korean industry and troop concentrations. Once the Chinese entered the conflict, MacArthur ended almost all restraints on bombing, calling for the destruction of “every installation, factory, city, and village” in North Korea (exempting targets near China and the Soviet Union, to avoid provoking further foreign intervention). Firebomb attacks, modeled after the raids against Japan late in World War II, caused heavy damage. A January 1951 raid on the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, burned down a third of the city. The United States also made extensive use of napalm (jellied gasoline that stuck to buildings and people while burning intensely).
By March 1951, momentum had shifted back to the UN forces, which recaptured Seoul. Sobered by recent events, the State Department now reversed its earlier position, opposing a new push north of the 38th parallel. MacArthur dissented, making known his desire to fight for the complete defeat of the Chinese in Korea, threatening to expand the war to China itself. After he repeatedly ignored orders not to publicly question U.S. policy, Truman relieved him of his command on April 11. When a new Chinese offensive failed to make headway, the war settled into a stalemate along a line not far from where it began.
On July 10, 1951, with all the major parties except the South Koreans reconciled to the restoration of the prewar situation, armistice negotiations began between U.S. military officials, the North Koreans, and the Chinese. After an agreement was reached for an armistice line along the battlefront, the talks stalled over prisoners of war. The Chinese and North Koreans demanded an exchange of all prisoners, while the United States insisted that captured soldiers who did not want to return to their homeland should not be forced to do so. As negotiations fruitlessly continued, so did the fighting. Some 45 percent of all U.S. casualties took place between the start of the talks and their conclusion two years later. To keep up pressure on the communists, the United States intensified its bombing campaign, demolishing dams and hydroelectric plants along the Yalu River and leaving eighteen of twenty-two major North Korean cities at least half destroyed.
Militarization
The outbreak of the Korean War began a long era of what Robert Taft called “semiwar,” in which the distinction between peace and war blurred. Military preparedness no longer was a response to particular crises but became an ongoing way of life. Militarizing the Cold War led to a restructuring of the federal government and its relationship to civil society, as the international contest became a formative presence in almost every sphere of American life.
Prior to Korea, the dominant Washington view saw the Soviet threat as primarily ideological, political, and economic, not military. The policy of containment, which George Kennan had popularized within and outside of the government, called for stopping further Soviet expansion with economic and political measures. Some State Department and military officials saw the need for a big military buildup to confront the Soviets, but Truman disagreed. Even after the Berlin blockade and the Chinese communist victory, he sought to restrain defense spending in order to achieve or at least move toward a balanced budget without cutting domestic programs or raising taxes.
Already, defense dominated federal outlays: national security expenses, including military spending, foreign assistance programs, veterans’ benefits, and atomic energy, accounted for three-quarters of the federal government’s fiscal 1950 budget. Truman proposed a modest cut for 1951, with $13.9 billion devoted directly to defense (less than an eighth of what the country spent at the height of World War II). Some officials within the administration thought that figure way too low. A National Security Council study of American strategy in light of Soviet nuclear capability, principally written by Paul Nitze, Kennan’s successor as head of the State Department Policy Planning Staff, depicted U.S. military strength as “dangerously inadequate” to meet the challenge from the Soviet Union, which it described as seeking “to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.” The document, labeled NSC-68, called for a buildup of conventional U.S. forces, nuclear weapons, and international assistance programs and new civil defense and psychological warfare efforts. Influenced by Leon Keyserling, a veteran New Dealer recently appointed head of the Council of Economic Advisers, the NSC-68 authors argued that increases in military spending “might not result in a real decrease in the standard of living, for the economic effects of the program might be to increase the gross national product by more than the amount being absorbed for additional military and foreign assistance purposes.” To support this Keynesian argument, NSC-68 cited the World War II experience.
Not pleased with the budgetary implications of NSC-68, Truman delayed acting on it. But once the Korean War started he approved its recommendations, ordering a massive increase in military spending. Various supplemental appropriations brought defense spending for fiscal 1951 to over three times the amount Truman had originally requested. Within a year, the armed services more than doubled in size.
The Korean War ended any possible American rapprochement with the Chinese communists. Before the war, some policymakers had argued, unsuccessfully, that the United States should accept the inevitable, recognize the new Chinese communist government (as the British had done), and try to woo it away from the Soviet Union. Instead, the war led the United States to build an anticommunist bloc in Asia, directed as much against the Chinese as the Soviets. The most dramatic turnaround came in Japan. During the first years of its occupation, the United States ordered the Japanese to embark on a radical program of disarmament, democratization, and economic restructuring, designed to make sure the country never made war again. But as the Cold War developed, the United States began reversing course. American occupation authorities took steps to weaken the political left and the labor movement and to reorient the Japanese economy away from China. After the start of the Korean War, the United States moved quickly to finalize a peace treaty with Japan and sign a mutual security agreement that gave it the right to maintain military bases there. American officials wanted Japan itself to rearm as part of an anticommunist bloc, but few Japanese leaders, even among the conservatives, desired to do so. Japan kept the ban on creating a military in its American-written constitution but did agree to create a “self-defense” force. Elsewhere in Asia, the United States, to bolster anticommunist forces and reassure its allies that Japan would not again threaten them, signed mutual security pacts with the Philippines, with Australia and New Zealand, and later with South Korea, the Nationalist Chinese, and Southeast Asian countries.
In Europe, too, the Korean War brought a militarization of American policy. Most dramatically, in September 1950 Acheson publicly proposed rearming Germany. To lessen European fears of possible German aggression, Truman sent four Army divisions to Europe—this sparked the congressional debate—beginning what became a permanent, large-scale deployment of U.S. troops on the continent. The United States also began including nondemocratic states in its anticommunist alliances. Truman had refused to recognize the fascist government in Spain, but after the start of the Korean War he reversed that policy and began negotiations that led, the year after he left office, to a treaty that gave it substantial economic and military aid in return for bases. In Libya, Morocc
o, and Saudi Arabia as well, the United States secured new military bases without regard to the nondemocratic practices of the host governments.
In 1950 the United States began a massive program to accelerate its production of atomic weapons, part of a nuclear arms race that accompanied the Korean fighting. From an estimated two hundred atomic bombs in mid-1949 the United States upped its arsenal to a thousand in mid-1953 and to an astounding stockpile of some eighteen thousand weapons by 1960. The first thermonuclear device (the “H-bomb”), tested by the United States on November 1, 1952, on the Pacific island of Eniwetok, had a thousand times the force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It left behind a crater two miles wide and a half mile deep. The Soviets exploded their first hydrogen bomb less than a year later.
As national security became an overriding concern and a hegemonic ideology, the military won unprecedented influence within the government and on the broader society. The nuclear buildup provides a case in point. A 1946 law gave control over nuclear research and weaponry to the civilian-led Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Though the military lost out in its desire to have direct control over atomic energy, in a compromise arrangement it did get a statutory role in running the AEC. Over time, it steadily increased its influence, in part through a series of political attacks, coordinated with congressional allies, on the agency’s civilian leaders for supposedly allowing security breaches. (Soviet spies had penetrated the atomic energy program, but had done so when the Army ran it, before the creation of the AEC.)
The AEC operated under a shroud of secrecy and outside of various laws and regulations that normally governed civilian society. Workers at AEC-run facilities could not go on strike, nor would the agency allow unions with left-wing leaders to represent employees at plants operated by its contractors. Denying security clearances to critics of government policy—including J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had led the scientific team that developed the atomic bomb—shut them out of AEC-sponsored research and advisory committees.
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