On 25 June, Kim Il-sung hurled his forces across the entire length of the 38th parallel. Using heavy artillery and tanks, including the Soviets’ mighty T-34s, the North Koreans made mincemeat of Syngman Rhee’s forces. They took Seoul three days after their offensive had begun. By then, the collapse of the South Korean forces was so complete that only 22,000 out of 100,000 troops could be accounted for and they had lost most of their heavy weapons and ammunition.8 US forces flown in from Japan were unable to halt the North Korean juggernaut, to both their surprise and mortification. By early August, American and South Korean forces had been pushed back all the way to the southern edge of South Korea, where they defended a precarious perimeter along the Naktong river west of Pusan.9
The Korean War
But Stalin, Kim and Mao had misjudged US intentions. In April 1950, at the same time that they were dismissing the probability of an American intervention, the US National Security Council adopted Paper 68, which became a cornerstone of US Cold War policy. Its premise was that the Soviet Union ‘seeks to impose its authority everywhere’ and so threatened ‘the destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself’.10 The paper also rejected as possible responses to the danger both isolation and war. With the Soviets now also having atomic bombs, the consequences of the latter were too awful to contemplate. NSC-68, as it became known, recommended ‘a more rapid building up of the political, economic, and military strength of the free world’ to contain the Soviet Union and prepare the West to defend itself in case of a Soviet attack.11
NSC-68 both fleshed out and reflected the policy of containment that had been articulated by the diplomat George Kennan in 1946 and 1947. In what came to be known as ‘The Long Telegram’, which he sent from his posting in Moscow to the State Department, Kennan argued that the USSR was an instinctively expansionist but ultimately weak state which could be contained through a series of flexible economic, political, ideological and, if need be, military countermeasures. In essence, he saw the world as in the midst of a struggle between a Communist bloc and the free world. This policy of containment, out of which grew the Truman Doctrine, led to the Marshall Plan of aid to Europe, support for Greece in its struggle with Communist rebels, and NATO. Kim Il-sung’s attack on South Korea was not considered a strategic threat in its own right, but it was interpreted from this Cold War point of view. Not confronting Kim in South Korea might, it was felt, embolden Moscow to step up its efforts to bring more of Europe under its sway, and that was considered a threat to the security of the USA.
Korea, then, was the first test of US resolve in the new Cold War. On 27 June, two days after the invasion of South Korea began, President Truman authorised the deployment of US forces to Korea, a decision he later characterised as more difficult than ordering the detonation of the two atomic bombs above Japan.12 From 7 July, the US forces were allowed to operate as UN Forces, after the UN Security Council condemned North Korea’s attack as a ‘breach of the peace’ at a meeting which the Soviets had declined to attend because it was boycotting the Security Council at the time in protest at its continued recognition of the Nationalists as China’s official government.13 Units from Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, France, the Philippines, the Netherlands and a few other countries assisted the Americans in Korea. General Douglas Mac-Arthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in Japan, was the first UN Commander of the Korean War.
At Pusan, the North Korean forces were at the end of very long supply lines and, after more than a month of fighting, their combat strength had weakened. UN forces gradually firmed up the Pusan defensive perimeter and by the end of August it was clear that Kim Il-sung’s forces would go no further. General MacArthur then masterminded a daring amphibious landing to the rear of the North Koreans, at Incheon, Seoul’s sea port just south of the 38th parallel. Ten-metre high tides (among the highest in the world), strong currents of as much as eight knots in Incheon’s two narrow approach channels, high sea-walls and long mudflats at low tide made any landing a gamble, but would also give it the element of surprise. Begun on 15 September, the landing by the US army’s X Corps succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest imaginings, except those of General MacArthur himself, who never lacked faith in his own ideas, and for whom the operation was to be the grand finale to an illustrious career. The North Koreans, assuming that a landing at Incheon was unlikely, had not even bothered to mine the approach channels.
Now it was the turn of the North Koreans to fall apart. UN Forces went on the offensive the day after the Incheon landings. The US army’s 1st and 11th Corps had reinforced its 8th Army, which was facing the Koreans at Pusan, while USA’s X Corps had landed at Incheon. Together with the X Corps, they threatened to encircle the by now tired and outgunned North Koreans. By 9 October, UN Forces had driven them back across the 38th parallel. On 26 October, the first South Korean units reached the Yalu river which marks the border between China and Korea.14 Rather than North Korea uniting the country, it was Syngman Rhee’s South Korea which stood on the brink of achieving that feat.
Mao Zedong now faced a difficult decision, one that could have cost him his revolution: intervene in Korea or stay out. Kim Il-sung would have preferred that the Soviets came to his assistance, but Stalin told him brusquely on 1 October that, if he needed help, he had better appeal to Beijing.15 Stalin also put pressure on Mao to assist Kim: ‘I think that if in the current situation you consider it possible to send troops to assist the Koreans, then you should move at least five or six divisions toward the 38th Parallel.’16 The Chinese had already concentrated 120,000 troops at Shenyang; they could go into action in short order.
Some very good arguments counselled against the deployment of this force into Korea. The Chinese Communists faced many urgent and difficult problems within China. Disarming the bandit gangs that were operating throughout the country, ensuring sufficient food supplies for its hungry population, and bringing order to a society in turmoil were only the most pressing of these. Rather than sending troops to Korea, the Communists would have preferred to invade Taiwan. Apart from anything, taking on the Americans was a far greater undertaking. General Lin Biao opposed intervention because he did not believe that the Communist forces were capable of succeeding and because he feared that it might trigger US attacks by air on China’s railway lines, ports and cities, possibly with atomic weapons. He declined to be appointed as commander-in-chief of any expeditionary force that might be despatched to Korea.17
On 3 October, Mao informed Stalin that ‘having thought this over’, he had concluded that now was not the time to invade: ‘in the first place, it is very difficult to resolve the Korean question with a few divisions (our troops are extremely poorly equipped); … in the second place, it is most likely that this will provoke an open conflict between the USA and China.’18 Pessimism reigned at a Communist Party Politburo meeting of 4 October, which rehearsed all the arguments against Chinese intervention: the inferiority of their troops; their unfamiliarity with the mountainous terrain of North Korea; the bitter cold of the now fast approaching winter; the problems of supplying troops outside China; and the possibility that the war might have a destabilising effect domestically.19
Stalin did not take no for an answer. He counselled Mao that a Fabian policy of waiting for events to develop carried great risks. ‘If a war is inevitable,’ Stalin told him, ‘then let it be waged now, and not in a few years’ time when Japanese militarism will be restored as an ally of the USA and Japan will have a ready-made bridgehead on the continent in a form of the entire Korea run by Syngman Rhee.’20 A US victory in Korea would mean, Stalin argued, that ‘China would fail to get back even Taiwan, which at present the United States clings to as a springboard, not for Chiang Kaishek who has no chance to succeed, but for themselves or for a militaristic Japan.’21 Reversing the USA’s earlier stance that it would not stand in the way of a Communist invasion of Taiwan, on 27 June President Truman had ordered the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Straits. Even if the ul
timate aim of the Chinese Communists was to control Taiwan, helping Kim Il-sung to beat back the Americans made sense.
Stalin’s arguments and a promise of Soviet air cover for their ground forces swayed Mao and his Politburo colleagues. On 5 October they agreed that China would intervene. The night before, Mao Zedong had persuaded the seasoned Communist General Peng Dehuai, who had fought with Mao since the early 1930s, to accept the position of commander-in-chief. At the meeting on 5 October, General Peng Dehuai spoke out strongly in favour of intervention, arguing that if the Americans were not stopped, they would be able to attack China from Korea and Taiwan.22 Mao Zedong told Stalin that China would ‘send to Korea nine, not six divisions’.23
Following the meeting, Zhou Enlai, recently installed as China’s premier, travelled with General Lin Biao to the Black Sea resort of Sochi for talks with Stalin. To their consternation, Stalin told them that no Soviet air cover would be provided for at least the first couple of months.24 Informed of this unwelcome surprise, Mao Zedong ordered a halt to all preparations for the invasion. Stalin, in turn, told Kim Il-sung that ‘you must prepare to evacuate completely into China and/or the USSR’.25 More meetings followed in Sochi and Beijing. Mao Zedong was overcome by doubt, not knowing whether to go ahead with an intervention or stay out of the conflict in Korea. He suffered many nights of insomnia, and ‘remained undecided even when our forces reached the Yalu river’, as one Chinese Communist general remembered.26 But on 19 October, Chinese Communist forces began to enter Korea as China’s People’s Volunteers, a disguise that fooled nobody but which indicated that the Chinese Communists did not want the fighting to be understood as being between China and the USA directly.
We do not know what, precisely, motivated Mao to approve China’s entry into the Korean War. Perhaps, at some dark moment in the middle of the night, as his mind was churning, he recalled Guo Moruo’s ‘1644’, the article in which Guo recounts how the peasant leader Li Zicheng, too busy indulging in victory celebrations in Beijing, failed to pay attention to threats mounting on his frontier and so lost his new dynasty to the Manchus in weeks. Stalin’s warning about the dangers of allowing the Americans to build up strong positions in Korea and Taiwan may have hit home, even haunted Mao, precisely because it echoed Guo’s. When Premier Zhou Enlai spoke on 24 October at a gathering of members of the People’s Political Consultative Conference, he made the same point: ‘If the DPRK [North Korea] is subjugated by the US imperialists, there will be no security for the Northeast [Manchuria].’27
It all worked out for Mao Zedong and his colleagues. The Korean War greatly enhanced the young People’s Republic’s international position, stabilised Communist rule in China and strengthened Mao Zedong’s own position in the Communist Party yet further. Over a period of two weeks, the Chinese Communists smuggled four armies and three artillery divisions across the Yalu river into North Korea. US intelligence failed to spot them, partly as a result of plain incompetence but also because of an unwarranted sense of superiority, disdain for Chinese Communist military capabilities and victory fever. With the North Koreans on the run and the USA’s 10th Corps and 8th Army thrusting towards the Yalu, General MacArthur and his staff, many of whom were under the spell of his charisma, bragged about being home before Christmas.
As in Manchuria, the Chinese Communists faced an enemy with modern weapons, this time with ample supplies and a powerful air force to boot. Neither a frontal assault nor establishing a defensive line and trying to hold it were promising options. Instead, the Chinese People’s Volunteers exploited the weak intelligence capabilities of the UN forces and the fact that their sumptuous equipment tied them to low-lying roads. Following a first probing attack, they withdrew and allowed UN units moving north to pass them by. They concentrated superior numbers on the UN forces’ flanks and rear, prepared battlefields and ambushes in the way of retreating forces, took up positions on high ground and gathered intelligence to identify the weaker units among the UN forces.28
On 25 November, the Chinese People’s Volunteers first hit Korean forces incorporated into the US 8th Army. Two days later they took on the 10th Corps, whose units were far too dispersed to be able to assist each other. Taken by complete surprise, the stunned UN commanders ordered the retreat.29 Even several days into the offensive, some senior commanders failed to realise what was happening. One told a subordinate commander that ‘the enemy who is delaying you for the moment is nothing more than remnants of Chinese divisions fleeing north’.30 On 3 December, UN forces evacuated Pyongyang in disarray, alongside 300,000 refugees. The Chinese People’s Volunteers had Seoul in their hands a month later.
The collapse was one of the worst in US military history. The shock was so severe that a successful retreat, such as that of the First Marine Division and the 7th US Army Division at Changjin reservoir, became celebrated in the US press as an act of outstanding heroism, in the same way that the evacuation of the defeated British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk in 1940 was turned into an inspiring tale of British defiance and pluck. ‘Surrounded and vastly outnumbered by savage enemies, fighting in temperatures as low as 25 below zero [Fahrenheit], not certain that there was any possible escape’, the US forces at Changjin reservoir ‘moved down in perfect order’, according to one New York Times article.31
Had the US journalists or UN commanders known that the Chinese People’s Volunteers had suffered tens of thousands of casualties and had to all intents and purposes been put out of action, the story of the battle for Changjin reservoir would have been told differently. And had they been aware of the assessment of Soviet advisors in Korea, it would have been told differently again. One Soviet advisor wrote that the Volunteers ‘deployed strength and equipment evenly along the front, and thus failed to concentrate for an offensive. Every army conducted its own isolated attacks. No powerful offensive was launched against the enemy’s vulnerable point.’32 Some of Lin Biao’s tactical principles had apparently been forgotten. The Chinese general in charge of logistics reported that the offensive went in two divisions short of its planned number and those troops that were involved ‘did not have enough to eat, [and] their winter uniforms were too thin … as a result, there occurred a large number of non-combat casualties’, that is, soldiers died from lack of food and exhaustion as well as being literally frozen to death.33 The UN disaster resulted from a collapse of nerve on its part as much as from superior Chinese intelligence, movement and aggression.
A new US commander, General Matthew Ridgway, who replaced General Walker after he was killed in a traffic accident, was able to revive the morale of the UN forces. Exploiting the UN’s superior air power, he brought the retreat to a halt 100 kilometres south of Seoul and succeeded in firming up a defensive line.34 In January 1950, the Chinese commander-in-chief, General Peng Dehuai, reached the conclusion that no further offensive operations should be conducted until his forces had been resupplied and had a chance to rest. But Mao, his confidence restored following the early victories of the People’s Volunteers, judged that the UN forces would withdraw after a symbolic defence and ordered Peng to keep the pressure on. Peng did as he was told and in February began another offensive. Although he managed to put the 8th Division of the South Korean army out of action, he made no further headway. With many Chinese divisions severely weakened, UN forces prepared to counter-attack. What was left of Seoul was back in their hands by 15 March.35
With UN forces back at the 38th parallel, President Truman had to decide whether to dig in or once again move on to the Yalu river. MacArthur favoured the latter option, and even called for expanding the war to China and bringing in the Nationalists. Truman definitely did not want that. He had ordered the US Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Straits not only to prevent a Communist invasion of Taiwan, but also to prevent the Nationalists from moving the other way. Despite presidential orders to the contrary, MacArthur vented his ideas in public and blamed Washington for making him fight with one hand tied behind his back. When President Truman recei
ved intelligence that the Soviets were considering joining the war in Korea if the Chinese People’s Volunteers were defeated, he secretly sent atomic bombs to east Asia in readiness for any eventuality. But he also judged that General MacArthur was too unpredictable, too independent and too cavalier about instructions from Washington to be relied upon at this critical time. He therefore recalled him, a difficult decision that could not but damage Truman’s domestic popularity, given the general’s enormous personal popularity. But Truman was determined to contain the fighting to Korea and therefore did not want to take any risks. UN forces did not cross the 38th parallel.36
Still convinced that the Chinese People’s Volunteers could defeat the UN forces, in May Mao Zedong ordered General Peng Dehuai to go on the offensive once more. General Peng attacked with 1 million men. The fighting was heavy and the Chinese and North Korean forces were able to punch a bulge in UN lines. However, when UN forces threatened to encircle these, General Peng ordered his forces to retreat. Some UN commanders wanted to pursue them. ‘We had him beaten and could have destroyed his armies’, General James van Fleet claimed later.37 But that was not Washington’s aim and UN forces stayed at the 38th parallel, leaving the Chinese People’s Volunteers free to lick their wounds.
After this last Chinese offensive, the Korean War entered a stalemate. From then until an armistice was agreed in 1953, the front lines did not change very much, even though the fighting still resulted in a large number of casualties. President Truman was ready to agree to a truce in the spring of 1951. He suggested a ceasefire plan to the UN Security Council which, had Mao accepted it, would have left the North Koreans with a larger territory, including Seoul, than they eventually did. But Mao rejected it.38 Only after the failure of a further offensive and the incurrence of yet more losses did he and Kim Il-sung accept that they were not going to prevail over the UN forces. Truce negotiations began in July 1951 but were concluded only after Stalin’s death on 5 March 1953. Having US forces embroiled in fighting the Chinese in Korea had suited him just fine.
China at War Page 38
