Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

by Burleigh, Michael

  He was, however, responsible for not equipping his troops for the Korean winter, when temperatures commonly fell to 20 or 30 degrees below zero, or for the mountainous terrain they would encounter further north, where the country expands into a vast and inhospitable landscape. Although MacArthur was scrupulous in leading with ROK troops, the US Eighth Army and X Corps were not far behind. They were closing on an area thick with hydroelectric plants, which provided power not just to Korea but also to China and the Soviet Union. On 9 October two US aircraft, badly off course, attacked a Soviet air base near Vladivostok, sixty miles inside the Soviet Union.

  It was at this moment that Truman flew to confer with MacArthur on Wake Island. With the Congressional elections on his mind, the President wanted to be seen to be associated with a successful commander, but he was also ensuring that MacArthur took his full share of responsibility for the next step.21 The two men barely talked about possible Chinese intervention. When the subject was raised, MacArthur dismissed as minimal the numbers of PLA who could have crossed the Yalu River already, and spoke confidently about the capacity of the air force to wipe them out. Truman made a public show of parting amicably from the General, but was privately furious that MacArthur did not salute him either when he met or when they parted.

  In late October MacArthur’s troops took the northern capital of Pyongyang. In an act of extraordinary hubris the General diverted incoming reinforcements to Hawaii and Japan while persisting in his drive towards the border with China on the Yalu River. He promised reporters that ‘the war very definitely is coming to an end shortly’. Again, it must be emphasized that Truman fully endorsed his plan to drive the North Koreans beyond the Yalu.22 There was also an ominous coda. Legally speaking, the South Koreans were not entitled to administer the North, which was supposed to be a task devolved upon the US by the United Nations. In reality, thousands of South Korean policemen arrived in Pyongyang, where they embarked on a murderous witch-hunt for Communist functionaries and Party members – the latter some 14 per cent of the population. Sometimes individual US units participated in the resulting atrocities.23

  Phantoms with No Shadows: Enter the Dragon

  By August 1950, a total of 260,000 People’s Liberation Army troops had moved to the North Korean border. The Chinese leadership had lost all faith in Kim Il Sung’s military competence when he over-extended his supply lines to Pusan, but Stalin goaded Mao, insisting that unless he intervened North Korea was about to be erased as a Communist state. Having once refused offers of men from China, Kim now sent ever more desperate messages for China to intervene. When Pyongyang fell to US and ROK troops, China’s supreme leader – safe inside one of his many nuclear shelters – decided to go to war. The Party began mass mobilization behind the slogan ‘The Great Movement to Resist America and Assist Korea’.24

  The Chinese leadership had discussed how to act throughout the first week of October 1950. They knew that it would not be like fighting the KMT in the civil war, where secret deals were more important than combat. Apart from Mao, party leaders worried that war with the US would jeopardize the consolidation of their victory in China itself. Their most distinguished soldier, Lin Biao, raised concerns that the US might intervene in Manchuria, or along the southern coast from Taiwan. He also told them that the firepower of a US division was ten or twenty times greater than that of an equivalent PLA formation, and warned that the Chinese would have little defence against enemy naval and air forces.25 Lin prudently used the excuse of imminent medical treatment in the Soviet Union to decline the command of China’s intervention forces.

  Mao turned instead to the highly experienced fifty-two-year-old Peng Duhai. He was from a very poor peasant family and had been forced by circumstances to work as a child labourer in a coal mine before becoming a soldier in Chiang’s army. He joined the Communist Party in 1928 and rose to be one of Mao’s top commanders. It proved unnecessary to win him round to the plan, as he was passionately convinced that the Americans had to be defeated in Korea to defend the revolution in China.

  To a degree the choice of field commander was irrelevant, as Mao himself directed the war in great detail. Like Hitler in his bunker, he pored over maps of Korea through the nights that followed; unlike Hitler, he smoked incessantly and drank so much tea that his teeth seemed to turn green. Mao’s paramountcy, born of his reputation as a strategic sage, was at stake. He was determined to show Stalin what the new China could do, with the blood price conveniently paid by KMT troops recently assimilated into the PLA. Stalin himself made his own calculations about eroding American strength with the aid of what Russians called limonski, or yellow-skinned cannon fodder. For these were not allies in the Roosevelt–Churchill mould. Only Stalin’s enormous prestige kept Mao’s resentments just beneath boiling point. On 8 October Mao informed a relieved Kim Il Sung of his decision, and Peng was sent to lead an army he had never commanded before, in a theatre about which he knew very little.26

  After being put on a state of alert in mid-August, the North-east Border Defence Army was renamed the Zhiyuanjun (Chinese People’s Volunteers, or PVA), a cosmetic change to permit the Chinese leadership to claim that the intervention was the expression of spontaneous mass support rather than state policy. The Chinese leaders believed that US soldiers were rubbish and that mass and stealth could overcome superior US technology, but Zhou Enlai and Lin Biao were despatched to the Crimea on 10 October to firm up Stalin’s earlier offer of support. Accustomed as he was to knowing American intentions in advance through his network of spies, Stalin had been rudely surprised by the US readiness to fight for Korea and baldly reneged on his promise to provide air cover to a Chinese invasion force. After a tense, ten-hour meeting, he agreed only to provide air cover north of the Yalu River.

  Stalin’s treachery imposed a delay on the intervention, planned for 15 October. Faced with well-reasoned dissent from his subordinate commanders about the frozen ground conditions as well as the lack of air cover, Peng himself threatened to resign and was recalled to Beijing for a face-to-face interview with the Chairman. Mao’s will prevailed and on the night of 19 October 1950 some 300,000 Chinese Volunteers began crossing the Yalu into North Korea in an operation so skilfully carried out that it has been described as ‘a phantom which cast no shadow’.27

  The shadow might have been identified if the Americans had been looking for it, but they were totally caught up in the euphoria of what had become a military procession through North Korea. At this stage there were only eight unoccupied towns left in North Korea, and resistance was so slight that B-29s switched from dropping bombs to dropping leaflets, while a loudspeaker-equipped Dakota known as ‘The Voice’ flew over the remaining enemy territory, booming out calls to surrender. Charles Willoughby, MacArthur’s egregious chief of intelligence, even denied the presence of the large contingent of ‘Chinese Koreans’ that Mao had deployed months earlier. When CIA operatives attached to the Seventh Fleet reported secret radio messages from former KMT soldiers who had been merged into the PLA, Willoughby threatened to expel the CIA from MacArthur’s command.

  US troops operating around Unsan captured prisoners who were taller than the North Koreans, and wore distinctive, heavily quilted uniforms. One of them admitted he was PLA and not a volunteer. When this information was relayed to General Walker he said, ‘Well, he may be Chinese, but remember they have a lot of Mexicans in Los Angeles but you don’t call LA a Mexican city.’ Further reports arrived of enemy dead equipped with American weapons and neatly packed gear, and carrying no personal identity papers or letters. US reconnaissance planes also began to notice massed footprints that suddenly seemed to vanish in the snow – in fact these were large numbers of Chinese lying still in their white camouflage suits – and dense rows of trees where none had stood before, and which on closer inspection seemed to move.28

  The self-styled expert on the ‘oriental mind’ failed to read it. MacArthur ignored all the contrary evidence and order
ed X Corps and Eighth Army north to the Yalu. Later he would claim it was a reconnaissance in force, designed to pre-empt a Chinese attack, but that was a lie. On 1 November US and ROK forces in the Unsan area were surprised by ferocious attacks by Chinese troops, who then melted away. Again, MacArthur wilfully misunderstood its significance. The preliminary attack was a warning from the Chinese of what they could do, and that UN forces had advanced too far. In essence they were redrawing the border well south of the Yalu River. Ignoring the warning, ROK troops pressed on to the river and ceremonially urinated in it.

  Starting on 25 November, the forces which MacArthur sent north in his ‘Home by Christmas’ offensive were attacked along a 300-mile front by 300,000 PVA, who compensated for their lack of radios by using bugles, cymbals, drums, whistles and even flutes for battlefield communications. They also attacked by night to neutralize the impact of US air supremacy and avoided roads, marching instead along Korea’s hilly central spine. They had a mere 300 trucks to move supplies (always at night because of US bombing) and were otherwise totally reliant on mules and human bearers to move ammunition, food and equipment south, and their wounded north. Yet an army whose doctrine relied on the co-operative attitude of surrounding peasants found itself as disliked by the North Koreans as the Americans were. The feeling was mutual, as the Chinese really did not like the North Koreans. The country was bleak, the women unappealing and the national dish of fermented and highly spiced cabbage produced epic flatulence.

  The troops themselves could move fast because they carried very little kit, and whereas a US division required 610 tons of supplies a day, the equivalent figure for the PVA was 50.29 PVA soldiers carried an odd assortment of mainly American and Japanese weapons, and lacked heavy artillery. Their reversible brown and white cotton-filled jackets were impossible to dry when they became wet because they dared not light fires. When the temperature really plummeted, they smothered their faces with pork fat and stuffed straw in their rubber-soled canvas sneakers. The only sleeping bags they possessed were captured from the enemy. Two-thirds of Chinese casualties were caused by frostbite, and it was certain death to fall into exhausted sleep without huddling together for warmth. They could eat only cold food, usually shaoping, unleavened bread made from a mixture of sorghum, millet, lima beans and flour which they carried with them. Chinese soldiers rarely received leave, except on extreme compassionate grounds, and their recreational activities were minimal. Medical provision for the wounded was primitive, only amputees were repatriated and the Chinese dead were rarely buried.

  In addition to dealing with primitive communications and tenuous logistics, Peng was constantly harassed by Mao and Kim. What was he to make of such exhortations as ‘Win a quick war if you can; if you can’t, win a slow one’?30 He did his best to make it quick. After destroying an ROK corps on the Ch’ongch’on River, he smashed the US 2nd Infantry Division on the right flank of the UN advance. US Eighth Army’s headlong retreat was covered by the suicidally brave stand of the Turkish Brigade. At Chosin Reservoir the US 7th Infantry Division Regimental Combat Team and the US 1st Marine Division were nearly encircled and suffered some 15,000 casualties before they escaped thanks to concentrated bombardment by the USAF and the massed guns of US X Corps.

  By mid-December the PVA had driven US Eighth Army from north-west Korea across the 38th parallel. In the north-east US X Corps inflicted devastating losses on the PVA 9th Army Group and established a hedgehog position around the port of Hungnam, but had to be withdrawn to bolster Eighth Army. The evacuation involved over 100,000 soldiers, almost as many civilians, 17,500 vehicles and 350,000 tons of supplies. Before departing they levelled Hungnam city, rendering the port unusable for the duration. On 16 December Truman declared a national emergency.

  Although victorious all along the line, Peng’s army had taken terrible punishment from US firepower. The Chinese leadership had the option of accepting an Indian-brokered ceasefire, but chose to order Peng to push south beyond the 38th parallel. Peng was compelled to press further south, even though he was acutely aware of his army’s logistical vulnerabilities and stiffening resistance as the ‘compressed spring’ effect made itself felt.31 On the last day of 1950 he launched a further offensive and took Seoul on 4 January 1951, but the cost was heavy.

  Just before Christmas 1950 General Walker was killed in a freak jeep accident. MacArthur had already decided to replace him with General Matthew Ridgway, a flinty, taciturn paratrooper who in June 1944 had jumped with his men in Normandy, and who had been director of athletics at West Point when MacArthur was superintendent. Rather than spoil the Christmas arrangements of his staff officers Ridgway flew to Tokyo alone on Christmas Eve. MacArthur told him: ‘The Eighth Army is yours, Matt. Do what you think best.’32

  The wider context in which Ridgway had to find his feet had become febrile. During a press conference on 30 November, Truman had declared that the use of all weapons at his disposal, including atomic bombs, was under ‘active consideration’ and that the field commander would be ‘in charge of the use of all these weapons’. He should have been more careful in his choice of words, or at least aware that they would be welcomed all too eagerly by a frantic MacArthur, who was desperate to redeem his error in advancing to the Yalu. His PR men played up the arrival of the ‘hordes’ they had hitherto dismissed as ‘mere laundrymen’. At one briefing a cynical correspondent asked, ‘Will you tell us how many Chinese battalions go to a horde, or vice versa?’33

  On Christmas Eve 1950 MacArthur submitted a targeting list that required twenty-six nuclear weapons, sixteen of which were to be used against Chinese industrial and military targets.34 The prospect of nuclear escalation brought a large British contingent to Washington, led by Attlee and Bevin. They insisted that they should have a say in the use of nuclear weapons, while underlining that they regarded a widening of the war as disastrous, not least for their outpost of Hong Kong. They were also angling for a US subsidy towards their £3,800 million rearmament programme, but that is another story.

  In fact, US policy-makers realized that select nuclear strikes would probably not impact much on China’s overall ability to wage war in Korea, while courting the real risk of the Soviets coming to the aid of their ally, in Europe rather than Asia. Unilateral use of atomic weapons would also turn the UN against the US, while alienating European (and Japanese) allies. This led US policy-makers to favour a local draw, but none of his titular superiors had the courage to inform MacArthur of this major change of policy, a moral lapse that slightly mitigated his future conduct.35

  On arrival in Korea, Ridgway spent time acquainting himself with his troops and with battlefields he surveyed from a small plane. He quickly decided that he could expect little of the ROK army; but his own men were cold and demoralized, mainly because they did not know what they were fighting for. They regarded Truman’s euphemism of a ‘police action’ as a bad joke – this was a very real war. Ridgway took care of their creature comforts and addressed a rousing message to them on 21 January 1951:

  The real issues are whether the power of Western civilization, as God has permitted it to flower in our own beloved lands, shall defy and defeat Communism; whether the rule of men who shoot their prisoners, enslave their citizens and deride the dignity of man, shall displace the rule of those to whom the individual and his individual rights are sacred; whether we are to survive with God’s hand to guide and lead us, or to perish in the dead existence of a Godless world.36

  Ridgway’s mantra was ‘Find them! Fix them! Fight them! Finish them!’ Behind the tough talk, however, he knew that his task was to strip the PVA of its sustaining belief in overwhelming invincibility, pitting US military technology against Chinese numbers. In essence, he was less concerned with battlefield victory than with increasing the rate of attrition that had already slowed the Chinese offensive until Beijing accepted the reality of a stalemate.

  Mao used the Korean War to whip up nationalist hysteria in
China to consolidate Communist rule. Few regimes in history – other than the one in North Korea – have so completely mobilized hysterical levels of enthusiasm or hatred, as well as enthusiastic hate too. Pride in China would lead to pride in Mao’s regime, a tactic the Communist Party has exploited ever since. The paradox of a ‘social imperialist’ war wrapped in the slogans of anti-imperialism is not often remarked by left-wing commentators, who invariably accuse regimes that do not pretend to be socialist of waging war for domestic political reasons.37 Mao was also the ultimate back-seat driver, constantly interfering in tactical decisions. An army trained for guerrilla warfare, and in which institutionalized command structures took second place to charismatic personalities, was not best suited to the needs of war against a well-equipped modern army. PVA troops could sustain a ferocious pace in battle for about three days, but after that failures of supply and support would lead to collapse. Lower-level officers and NCOs were forbidden to use their own initiative and lacked the authority to call in such support as was available – unlike their opponents, who could call in almost unlimited artillery and, when weather permitted, terrifying air attacks.38

  While Ridgway worked out how to achieve a draw, the seventy-one-year-old MacArthur was determined to close out his career with an unambiguous victory. On 30 December 1950 he lobbied the Republicans in Washington to be allowed to blockade the Chinese mainland, even though most PVA supplies came overland. He wanted to bomb China’s strategic defence industries, even though the results of such bombing during the Second World War had been questionable. He wanted Chinese Nationalist troops to be sent to Korea as reinforcements and to launch diversionary attacks on the Chinese mainland from Taiwan, apparently unaware that Chiang Kai-shek’s forces lacked amphibious capacity. He was also not slow to ventilate his belief that the war in Korea was being fought half-heartedly, dismissing Ridgway’s approach as ‘an accordion war’ in which the combatants seesawed back and forth.