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

by Burleigh, Michael

  Truman set his staff to investigate the analogous precedent of General George McClellan, whom Abraham Lincoln had sacked during the American civil war for blaming his military failure on the political direction of the war. Their findings confirmed what the amateur historian Truman believed already. The trouble was that in the popular mind MacArthur was more like the victorious Ulysses Grant than the hapless McClellan. But in the end it was intolerable that a serving officer should be openly conspiring with the political opponents of the administration. MacArthur’s wild talk of extending the war to China threatened the international backing the US enjoyed in Korea and invited Soviet retaliation in Europe, but the sacking point was his flagrant attempt to usurp the power of his constitutional Commander-in-Chief. Truman summarily dismissed MacArthur in April 1951, a decision so unpopular that supporters of the President were ordered out of taxis by irate drivers and married couples ended up in jail after brawling over it.

  Three months before this melodrama unfolded, Ridgway had to deal with the renewed Chinese onslaught that took Seoul but then ran into well-prepared UN defensive positions at the intersection of the main east–west and north–south rail and road routes that quartered Korea. PVA losses in the battles of Chipyongni and Wonju were catastrophic, and to add to his troubles Peng now had to guard against being cut off by a second Inchon landing.39 Seoul was untenable and the war settled down to a struggle along what Ridgway called the ‘Main Line of Resistance’ around the 38th parallel. Ferocious battles still occurred, the doomed stand of the 1st Battalion of the British Gloucestershire Regiment on the Imjin River taking place at the end of April. Peng returned to Beijing, where he took his life in his hands by interrupting Mao’s sleep to argue the folly of further massed offensives. Mao was already halfway persuaded that the political gains from the PVA intervention were sufficient and agreed to a new strategy of ‘fighting while negotiating’, with the exhausted Chinese troops permitted to create strong defensive positions as arrangements were made for them to be rotated back to China. Once Stalin had endorsed it, Kim was compelled to accept it.40

  The Korean War had served many useful purposes for the Soviet dictator, who fought it to the last Chinese. It confirmed his low view of US fighting prowess and the sentimental weakness of US public opinion, as he revealed in comments to Zhou Enlai in autumn 1952:

  Americans are not capable of waging a large-scale war at all, especially after the Korean War. All of their strength lies in air power and the atom bomb. Britain won’t fight for America. America cannot defeat little Korea. One must be firm when dealing with America. The Chinese comrades must know that if America does not lose this war, then China will never recapture Taiwan. Americans are merchants. Every American soldier is a speculator, occupied with buying and selling. Germans conquered France in 20 days. It’s been already two years, and the USA has still not subdued little Korea. What kind of strength is that? America’s primary weapons are stockings, cigarettes and other merchandise. They want to subjugate the world, yet they cannot subdue little Korea. No, Americans don’t know how to fight. After the Korean War, in particular, they have lost the capability to wage a large-scale war. They are pinning their hopes on the atom bomb and air power. But one cannot win a war with that. One needs infantry, and they don’t have much infantry; the infantry they do have is weak. They are fighting with little Korea, and already people are weeping in the USA. What will happen if they start a large-scale war? Then perhaps, everyone will weep.41

  The war consolidated Chinese dependence on the Soviets, while digging a huge trench between China and the US, where residual sympathies for China had been supplanted by images of menacing ‘Mongol’ hordes. Stalin took a keen interest in the fighting, especially the air war, where he was testing his own resources and acquiring US technology when it fell out of the sky. The Soviets had around seventy search parties roving around the battlefields, hoping to get their hands on downed F-86 fighter jets, as well as G-suits and radar bomb sights. With the flow of technology from British sympathizers interrupted, these salvage operations played a role in the development of equivalent Soviet weaponry second only to espionage.

  Stalin authorized the armistice talks that began in July 1951 at Kaesong, where the subjects of whose chair was higher or faced north or south (in China victors always face south) occupied many a week, before the talks were relocated to a permanent site at Panmunjon. Meanwhile the opposing sides constructed formidable lines of underground defences across the 150-mile width of the peninsula, with the US-led coalition digging in deep in opposed positions. Both sides continued to pressure each other with offensive action, with the infamous battles for Pork Chop Hill taking place in the spring and summer of 1953, ending three weeks before the armistice was signed. Fighting while negotiating had simply added to the enormous human cost of what had long since become a futile struggle for geographical features of no strategic value whatever.42

  On the UN side, Curtis LeMay’s Strategic Air Command was turned loose to prove that air power could win a war, the untested conceit of the British and American air force commanders during the Second World War, and his default solution too to Russian missiles being based in Cuba a decade later. Whereas the USAAF had dropped some half a million tons of bombs throughout the entire Pacific theatre during the Second World War, 635,000 tons were unloaded on North Korea, with a further 32,557 tons of napalm.43 The cities of North Korea were reduced to ruins and dams such as those at Toksan breached, washing away roads and railways, without significantly diminishing the fighting power of the armies along the 38th parallel. The B-29s suffered rising losses once the enemy deployed the new MiG-15, some of them flown by Soviet pilots over the Yalu River in dogfights with US F-86 Sabres escorting the bombers. Ominously, Operation Hudson Harbor saw lone B-29s flying dry runs for using nuclear weapons, a bluff called by Chinese expertise in dispersion, which meant that there were never any troop concentrations large enough to merit the use of such weapons.44

  On the other side, Mao may have abandoned the hope of winning the war but he still poured troops and supplies into Korea, so that the PVA had 1.35 million men there by early 1953, with 120,000 tons of ammunition and a quarter of a million tons of grain. It was more than sufficient to launch another offensive, but, if one was contemplated, Stalin’s sudden death in early 1953 forestalled it. The war had done nothing to prevent Mao asserting his grip on the wider Chinese empire at a time when he was allegedly still under Stalin’s thumb. In 1950–1 Chinese forces invaded Tibet, all the while proclaiming respect for Tibetan autonomy, and Han Chinese, mainly demobbed ex-KMT troops, were sent to colonize strategically vital Xinjiang, the Muslim Uighur-dominated region which bordered on four of the Soviet republics as well as Mongolia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, and also contained large reserves of oil and natural gas.45

  In the United States, from enjoying overwhelming initial public support the Korean War had become deeply unpopular, a fate shared by the Democrats, who had been continuously in power since 1933. By early 1951 as many as 66 per cent of Americans wanted ‘to pull our troops out of Korea as fast as possible’, while 49 per cent regarded the war as a mistake. Truman’s personal popularity plummeted to a miserable 26 per cent and MacArthur did his best to send it further downwards. He returned to a hero’s welcome in the US and, after his bathetic address to Congress about old soldiers never dying, Truman sneered at ‘damn fool Congressmen crying like a bunch of women’. In fact the ensuing Congressional inquiry pricked MacArthur’s bubble by exposing his professional errors and his outrageous attempt to dictate global strategy in the service of the single theatre for which he was responsible.46

  The ceasefire talks dragged on because of the vexed issue of prisoner repatriation. While all but a handful of UN converts to Marxist-Leninism wished to flee the Chinese people’s paradise as soon as possible, most of the 116,000 POWs held by the Americans did not wish to return to Communist China or North Korea. Even when the US, in a morally abje
ct exercise of realpolitik, offered to return at least 70,000–80,000 of them against their will, the Chinese sensed a loss of face and sought to deny the Americans the moral high ground by fabricating claims that the US was using biological weapons, supported by the testimony of a handful of coerced POW pilots. Truman found this war without end intensely frustrating, using his diary to give vent to apocalyptic fantasies of blockading China’s coast, destroying its industrial cities and taking on the Soviets in an all-out war.

  Eisenhower, the Republican presidential nominee universally known as ‘Ike’, rode the wave of domestic weariness with this faraway war. His prestige quite as strong as MacArthur’s, Ike seemed both more moderate and entirely at home in civilian garb, and promised to fly to Korea to end the conflict. At the same time he won over the rabid anti-Communist right by choosing Richard Nixon as his running mate and associating himself with McCarthyism: ‘find the pinks: we will find the Communists; we will find the disloyal’, he declared on the stump in Montana. After winning the 1952 election but before taking office, he kept his promise and went to Korea, where he flew over the lines and observed an exchange of artillery fire. Desultory struggles over burned-out hills, he decided, would not bring victory in the wider struggle with Communism.47 On his return he indulged MacArthur with an audience, but rejected his loose talk about nuclear warfare. After their meeting MacArthur growled that Eisenhower ‘never did have the guts, and never will’.

  In fact Ike wanted a summit with Stalin designed to agree the neutralization of democratic Germany, Austria, Japan and Korea, failing which the US would launch an all-out nuclear assault against North Korea and China. More immediately, the Chinese were discreetly informed that, if they did not enter talks, then Eisenhower would wage war with every weapon at his disposal, as he had done to devastating effect against Hitler’s Germany.48 The new President also increased the tension by withdrawing the US Seventh Fleet from the Taiwan Straits, seeming to clear the way for a Nationalist invasion of the mainland. Mao judged the threats to be credible.

  When UN Commander Mark Clark, who replaced Ridgway in May 1952, offered an exchange of sick and wounded POWs, the Chinese responded in kind. The wider POW repatriation problem was resolved by putting the prisoners in UN custody, which defused the issue. Serious negotiations resumed at Panmunjom, although the Chinese launched some late offensives to maximize their negotiating position. A fly in the ointment was Syngman Rhee’s devil-may-care desire to go on fighting to liberate the North. When in June 1953 he unilaterally turned loose some POWs whose fate was still under discussion, Eisenhower’s cabinet discussed removing him through a military coup or an assassin’s bullet. Even though a ceasefire had been declared, and signature of an armistice was imminent, the Chinese launched another limited offensive to punish Rhee.

  The armistice was signed at Panmunjom on 27 July 1953, although internal Korean crises continue to flare up to this day, bringing the real threat of global nuclear war in their wake.49 The war had cost China 152,000 dead and 230,000 wounded. The US lost 33,629 dead and a further 105,000 wounded; their UN allies 1,263 dead and 4,817 wounded. Korean casualties were far greater, since both North and South carried out vicious purges when they occupied each other’s territory. South Korea lost 415,000 killed and 429,000 wounded, plus another half-million civilian dead. North Korea suffered over half a million military fatalities, with anywhere between one and two million civilians killed. The 38th parallel, and particularly Panmunjom itself, remains one of the most febrile flashpoints in the world, where the miserable hermit kingdom of Kim Il Sung’s grandson Kim Jong Eun still trains guns and atomic missiles on a democratic and thriving South Korea.50

  The war in Korea also underlined the strategic importance of South-east Asia, to the extent that the US felt obliged to support the European powers in their colonial wars. Economic interests played a role, but they were not those of the US itself, which was an exporter of rice and could access all the region’s raw materials elsewhere. Rather it was a strategic decision related to the economic health of Britain, France and Japan, for which the US judged South-east Asia to be vital. This was also why the British were prepared to fight a long counter-insurgency war in Malaya so that its independence would be on their terms.51

  6. ‘EMERGENCY’: MALAYA

  Yesterday’s Heroes, Tomorrow’s Enemies

  Malaya was the only place where in their empire’s twenty-year post-war collapse the British fought an insurgency based specifically on Maoist doctrines of revolutionary warfare, as distinct from nationalists seeking their country’s independence. Having lost Malaya under humiliating circumstances, the British stole back late in 1945 under the shadow of the atom bombs, directed by Mountbatten’s South East Asia Command based in Ceylon. The Americans wanted the European colonial powers to follow their lead in promising the Philippines independence, and in Malaya the British would do enough to satisfy the Americans by highlighting their desire for an integrated multiracial outcome. Once Washington appreciated that the loss of their colonial assets would undermine the ability of the colonial powers to withstand Communism in Europe, British policy adjusted to the new anti-Communist imperative.1

  The insurgency was born in May 1948 when fifty men converged on an isolated jungle encampment in Malaya’s Pahang state, one of nine sultanates of the newly minted Federation of Malaya. Elaborate security measures, including concentric rings of sentries and relays of escorts, ensured that the leadership of the Malayan Communist Party would be undisturbed. Fearing that the Party was about to be declared illegal by the British High Commissioner, Sir Edward Gent, these men had to decide what future strategy to pursue.

  The key decision-maker in the party of equals was a twenty-four-year-old Malay Chinese called Chin Peng (pronounced ‘Pong’, a source of wry amusement to the British). He was the son of the owner of a cycle-repair shop who, as a schoolboy, helped raise aid for mainland Chinese resistance to Japanese occupation. In 1940 he shifted his political allegiances from the KMT to the Communists. Chin Peng followed many other Communists into Force 136, a stay-behind operation directed by British SOE agents.

  Eventually numbering around 5,000 guerrilla fighters, they called themselves the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) to disguise the British connection. Most fighters were ethnic Chinese, part of the Chinese diaspora which the Japanese had targeted with genocidal savagery. They were under twenty-five, former rubber tappers, mining coolies, woodcutters, shop assistants and domestic servants. In so far as there was any effective resistance to the Japanese in Malaya, it came from these brave men and women.2

  Communal violence began the moment Japan surrendered, when these mainly ethnic Chinese guerrillas emerged from the jungle to wreak vengeance on predominantly Malay ‘collaborators’, which in turn triggered an ethnic Malay pogrom against the Chinese.3 By December 1945 the British had formally disarmed the Communist guerrillas. There was a parade in Kuala Lumpur at which each fighter received a campaign medal, M$350 (about £45) and a copy of General Sir Frank Messervy’s speech praising their gallantry. Fifteen Communist leaders were also honoured, to the accompanying strains of a band of the Royal Marines, at an even grander parade in Singapore presided over by Mountbatten. Chin Peng was judged sufficiently meritorious to be appointed to the Order of the British Empire (subsequently rescinded). An ex-MPAJA Comrades’ Association kept the flame of resistance alive, and enabled the Communists to tap the former fighters’ modest military pensions.4

  The Emergency, a choice of name we shall explore below, erupted in one of the most beautiful lands on earth, and probably the greenest, its humidity relieved only by monsoons in which the wind-driven rain can be almost horizontal. The size of England without Wales, the country is surrounded by sea except for a 170-mile land border with Thailand. Four-fifths of Malaya is covered by equatorial forest, in the depths of which dwelled orang asli aboriginal tribes. European settlers and Chinese immigrants were responsible for Malaya’s two m
ain wealth generators. Britons imported Brazilian rubber plants that flourished in Malaya’s climate once the jungle had been cleared, and the Chinese began open-cast mining of tin, leaving muddy smudges on the landscape. By the twentieth century there were around 3,000 rubber plantations, the smaller run by single traders and the larger managed on behalf of such tyre manufacturers as Dunlop or Goodyear. There were also 750 tin mines, operated by Chinese as well as by Europeans and a large number of Americans.5

  At the time of the Emergency Malaya’s population was 5,300,000, the narrow majority (46 per cent) being Muslim Malays, plus 600,000 Tamil labourers recruited from southern India. However, 38 per cent of the population were ethnic Chinese, immigrants since the fifteenth century. The Chinese were clannish and culturally insular, but also in reaction to Muslim clannishness over dietary matters and marriage with infidels. The British had governed the Malay Chinese through a separate Chinese protectorate, which it was said ‘was not so much to protect the Chinese as to protect the country against them’.

  After the war, the British sought a progressive goal by regressive means, largely with an eye on changing American attitudes. They abrogated the sovereignty of the five independent sultans (four others were already in a mini-federation) and attempted to integrate the Chinese into a multiracial Malay Union. This was unpopular. The British next alighted on a federation as a more acceptable alternative, partially restoring the powers of the sultans over religious matters, which in a Muslim society meant over much of the law. Throughout Malaya, the British were like a class apart – interaction with the locals, apart from elite or rich ‘honorary Europeans’, being confined to much beloved servants or, on isolated estates, Asian concubines. British society was highly stratified itself, with a major fault-line running between ‘officials’ of the Malayan Civil Service and the ‘unofficial’ men of business and trade, with a sort of apartheid even as to who could occupy which end of the various club bars, and an acronym-heavy code based on civil service rank, company name or job title. As elsewhere in the empire, the unwritten rule was to get native elites to play the game of ritual and status, luring them in with medals and titles.6