The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  To the Americans and others in the West, this was not a civil war, but a border crossing, a case of one country invading another, and thus a reminder of how the West had failed to halt Hitler’s aggression in the days leading up to World War II. To the Chinese, the Russians, and the North Koreans that was a surprising point of view. They had chosen at that point not to think of the thirty-eighth parallel, selected by the Americans and the Russians back in 1945 as the dividing line between the two Koreas, as a border at all. (That would change a few months later when the American and UN forces crossed the parallel heading north.) What they had done on June 25 was, in their view, just one more act in a long-term struggle on the part of the Korean people, part of an unfinished civil war like the one under way in Indochina and the one just ended in China.

  THERE HAD BEEN signs of a buildup in the weeks before the assault, but when the American intelligence reports were checked out daily, the signs had somehow slipped through the cracks, buried among the background noise of countless daily charges and countercharges, of incidents and counterincidents produced by a contested border separating two aggressive, very angry antagonists. Still, had they paid closer attention, the American authorities might have recognized that something quite ominous was beginning to take place. A young American intelligence officer named Jack Singlaub, who served in China with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which had now become the CIA, had been training a number of Korean agents to look for indicators that Pyongyang was up to something more than their normal hit-and-run guerrilla raids. Then he had sent his men north as early border crossers. They were new at the game, and their training was hardly of the highest order, so they had been told to look for the simplest of things: first and most important, any uprooting or displacement of Korean families in the border area, a sign that preparations were under way for which the Communist authorities wanted few witnesses; second, the strengthening or widening of smaller bridges; third, any work that might indicate a reopening of the north-south rail lines.

  Singlaub’s agents were young, but he thought a number of them were surprisingly good. Late that spring, he received a number of very valuable reports that the North Koreans were moving additional elite units up to the border, and civilians away from it. In addition he was being told that there was a good deal of work taking place on the bridges; and that some railroad lines near the border were being repaired, often at night. Singlaub was sure that buried among all the other bits of intelligence he was getting about endless border incidents, something important was taking place.

  Singlaub was working under considerable professional limitations. He could not even operate openly in Korea, because he was a former-OSS-now-CIA agent, and Douglas MacArthur as well as his chief of intelligence, Brigadier General Charles Willoughby, had hated the OSS. They had kept it out of their theater of operations during World War II; now they were intent on doing the same with the CIA. Some of that hatred came from MacArthur’s well-known Anglophobia, his dislike of the Eastern Establishment types who had been so influential in the OSS and effectively dominated it; but some of it was a good deal more practical. If his G-2 controlled the intelligence coming out of his theater of operation, then he was more likely to control any decision-making about the theater. He and Willoughby preferred that the Pentagon and the Truman administration be completely dependent upon them for any information about what was going on in their area of Asia—with no countervailing intelligence to limit his hand. Control intelligence, and you control decision-making.

  THAT THE TOKYO command was not tuned to what was happening did not surprise George Kennan, who had come away from an earlier trip to Tokyo deeply suspicious of the quality and competence of MacArthur’s staff, especially the intelligence people, whom he thought Pompous, far too ideological, and dangerously overconfident. When he had mentioned to one senior Air Force officer the geopolitical vulnerability of Korea if American regular ground forces were pulled out, the officer had said there would be no need for ground troops because strategic bombing from Okinawa would take care of any potential enemy. Kennan, who had followed how the Chinese fought in their own civil war, seemingly impervious to enemy airpower, was not so sure. Then in May and June of 1950, some of his people at the State Department’s Policy Planning began picking up soundings that something very big was happening in the Communist world and that a large force was going into action soon. At that point the varying American intelligence agencies placed the entire Communist world under intense scrutiny and came away convinced that it was not the Russians nor any of their Eastern European satellites. Perhaps, Kennan thought, it might be Korea. Back from the military came the word that a Communist attack there “was practically out of the question: the South Korean forces were so well armed and trained that they were clearly superior to those of the North.”

  SO WHEN THE reports of Singlaub’s agents were finally integrated into the larger intelligence yield, they came back from Willoughby’s shop with an “F-6” label—agents not considered trustworthy, and reports unlikely to be true—the lowest possible rating. And thus when the In Min Gun advanced the morning of June 25, they caught the South Korean troops and their American advisers completely unaware. It was not close to a fair fight. The North Korean troops were very good and very well equipped. In many instances their weapons had been newly manufactured in Russia and shipped to them specifically for use in this offensive. The soldiers were well trained, and they outnumbered the South Korean troops almost two to one. Close to half of them were combat tested, some forty-five thousand Korean nationals who had fought in China having been gradually transferred from the Chinese Communist army to In Min Gun units with Mao’s approval. These were men who in many cases had been fighting for more than a decade and had survived a war where the other side always had superior weaponry. The In Min Gun was an exceptionally accurate reflection of the authoritarian society just then taking root in the North: a controlled, disciplined, extremely hierarchical, highly indoctrinated army, fighting for a highly controlled, disciplined, hierarchical government. The soldiers were mainly of peasant background and their grievances were very real: they were embittered against their poverty, against the Japanese who had ruled them so cruelly, against the upper-class Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese; and now they were indoctrinated against the Americans, who in their minds had replaced the Japanese in the South. They were nothing if not hardened: the dogmas they believed had been repeatedly validated by the cruelty of their own and their families’ lives.

  IN SEOUL THE Americans who were part of the small political and military advisory presence were somewhat slow to react, slow to understand that it was the real thing and that as many as one hundred thousand North Korean soldiers were in play. The North Korean assault had begun at 4 A.M. on Sunday in Korea, or 3 P.M. Saturday in Washington. John Muccio, the American ambassador to South Korea, considered an unusually able State Department official, heard of it four hours after it started, when he got a call from one of his top aides. “Brace yourself for a shock,” Everett Drumwright, the American chargé d’affaires in Seoul told Muccio. “The Communists are hitting all along the front.” Syngman Rhee heard of it at 6:30 A.M., which means that for at least an hour and a half he did not alert the Americans. After Muccio spoke to Drumwright, they decided to meet at the embassy. On the way over there he ran into Jack James, a United Press reporter who had intended to do some work and then go on a picnic that day. Muccio told James that he was checking out a report that the North Koreans had attacked all along the border. Just as James entered the embassy, he ran into a friend who worked in military intelligence. “What do you hear from the border?” the officer asked James. “Not very much yet,” James replied. “What do you hear?” “Hell, they’re supposed to have crossed everywhere except in the Eighth Division Area,” the officer answered.

  With that, James went to a phone and started making calls frantically, trying to piece it all together. A little later, around 8:45 A.M. Seoul time, one of the
Marine guards, Sergeant Paul Dupras, asked him what was going on. “The North Koreans have crossed the border,” he answered. “That’s nothing—that’s a common occurrence,” Dupras said. “Yeah, but this time they’ve got tanks,” James answered. James kept getting more and more details, and at 9:50 A.M., he sent out his first bulletin. He had been moving around the city, and when he returned to the embassy and one of his friends in military intelligence said something about letting Washington know about it, he decided that if it was good enough for them to go with, then it was good enough for him as well. He was careful, he said later, not to hype it, because it was a question of war and there was no need to make more of it than there was, because surely there would be plenty of details in the hours and days that followed. Though UP was notoriously cheap, he took it on himself to send the bulletin at urgent rates. Because he moved so quickly, his story was the only one to arrive back in America and make the Sunday morning papers. It began in typical wire service fashion: “URGENT UNPRESS NEW YORK 25095 JAMES FRAGMENTARY REPORTS EXTHIRTY EIGHTH PARALLEL INDICATED NORTH KOREANS LAUNCHED SUNDAY MORNING ATTACKS GENERALLY ALONG ENTIRE BORDER PARA REPORTS AT ZERO NINETHIRTY LOCAL TIME INDICATED KAESONG FORTY MILES NORTHWEST SEOUL AND HEADQUARTERS OF KOREAN ARMY’S FIRST DIVISION FELL NINE AYEM STOP ENEMY FORCES REPORTED THREE TO FOUR KILOMETERS SOUTH OF BORDER ON ONJIN PENINSULA STOP TANKS SUPPOSED BROUGHT INTO USE CHUNCHON FIFTY MILES NORTHWEST SEOUL….”

  In Washington, there were more and more fragmentary reports coming in from the embassy. But it was James’s United Press bulletins that alerted the city. As others in the United Press bureau, and soon other newspaper bureaus, began calling high public officials to get some kind of confirmation, the top people in government were alerted to the fact that a new and very unwanted war had begun on the Korean peninsula.

  WHEN THE NORTH KOREANS attacked, Douglas MacArthur was surprisingly slow to respond. He seemed almost indifferent to the early news of the invasion, so much so that he worried some of the men around him. Nor were these witnesses committed liberals, the kind of sworn enemies he believed were always out to undermine him for domestic political reasons; they included one of the most conservative men connected to the U.S. national security apparatus, John Foster Dulles, the shadow Republican secretary of state, then serving as an adviser to the State Department; and John Allison, one of the more hard-line members of the State Department, who was serving as Dulles’s aide on a trip to Seoul and Tokyo.

  By chance both Dulles and Allison had arrived in Tokyo to discuss a future peace treaty that would formally end the American occupation of Japan, when the North Koreans struck. Just a few days before the attack, both men had visited a South Korean bunker near the thirty-eighth parallel. There they were photographed huddled with ROK troops. Dulles, wearing his signature homburg, looked like he was on his way to a meeting of top Wall Street bankers. “Foster up in a bunker with a homburg on—it was a very amusing picture,” said Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who had no fondness for the man who wanted to take his job, and had been sure he was going to get it a mere eighteen months earlier, when Tom Dewey had run for the presidency. The next day Dulles, a man possessed of no small amount of grandiosity, blended as it was with a streak of great personal and religious righteousness, had spoken before the South Korean National Assembly. “You are not alone,” he told the assembly. “You will never be alone so long as you continue to play worthily your part in the great design of human freedom.” Those words had been specifically written for Dulles and that occasion back in Washington, by men who would in different ways emerge in the coming months as leading hardliners: Dean Rusk, the new assistant secretary of state for the Far East, and Paul Nitze, the head of Policy Planning. Still, for all the intensity of Dulles’s rhetoric, there was no real reason to feel that South Korea was in any great danger. Just a few days earlier both Dulles and Allison had been briefed by General Willoughby, and the subject of a potential North Korean attack had never come up.

  When the North Koreans struck, Dulles and Allison had an unusually intimate view of MacArthur’s headquarters in action—the view of men ideologically sympathetic, but who were not members of MacArthur’s inner team. From the start, the news coming in was very bad, yet MacArthur and his staff seemed curiously casual about it. There was a briefing that first Sunday night, June 25, at which MacArthur seemed far too relaxed. The early reports, he told Dulles and Allison, were inconclusive. “This is probably only a reconnaissance-in-force. If Washington only will not hobble me, I can handle it with one arm tied behind my back,” he said. Then he added that President Rhee had asked for some fighter planes, and though he thought the Koreans could not use them properly, he intended to send a few along, just for morale purposes.

  Dulles, Allison thought, seemed momentarily relieved by MacArthur’s aura of confidence, but he still wanted to send a cable to Acheson and Rusk, urging immediate help for the South Koreans. But the more Allison and Dulles talked to men outside MacArthur’s coterie, the more uneasy they became. That very first night, Allison had gone to dinner with an old friend, Brigadier General Crump Garvin, commander of the Port of Yokohama. Garvin startled him by confiding that there had been serious reports coming through Eighth Army Intelligence for the past two or three weeks indicating that civilians near the North Korean side of the parallel were being moved away and that the North Koreans were concentrating large numbers of troops just above the border. “Anyone who read the reports could see something was going to happen and soon. I don’t know what G-2 in Tokyo has been doing,” Garvin told Allison.

  4. THE NORTH KOREAN INVASION, JUNE 25–28, 1950

  On Monday, the gap between reality in the field and that in MacArthur’s headquarters seemed to grow wider. Ambassador Muccio, the senior American State Department representative in Korea, had ordered the immediate evacuation of American women and children from the country. MacArthur, still on automatic pilot, suggested that it was a premature move. There was, he insisted, “no reason to panic in Korea.” Yet the news coming in was uniformly bad. That night the two high-ranking visitors separated, Allison to have dinner with some senior officials in Tokyo, Dulles to attend a private dinner with MacArthur. Allison’s dinner party was interrupted by the constant comings and goings of senior journalists and diplomats, all of them checking with their sources during the evening, all coming back with increasingly somber reports—the South Koreans were being routed. At the end of the evening, Allison decided to check in with Dulles, certain that he would know far more from his dinner. “I suppose you’ve heard the bad news from Korea,” he began. Dulles had heard nothing. “But didn’t you have dinner with the general?” Yes, Dulles answered, just the two couples, but after dinner they had watched a movie, the general’s favorite form of entertainment. No one had interrupted their evening. Dulles thereupon called MacArthur to report on what he had heard about the South Korean collapse. The general said he would look into it. “This may have been one of the few times in American history when representatives of the State Department have had to tell a high American military commander about what was happening in his own backyard,” Allison later wrote.

  The next day brought yet more signs that a disaster was unfolding in front of them. Ambassador Muccio reported that Seoul was being evacuated, that he and Rhee were about to head south of Taejon, below the Han River. That day Dulles and Allison were scheduled to fly back to the United States. While they were waiting at Haneda Airport, a transformed MacArthur joined them. Allison was shocked by the change in the man. The jaunty, confident figure who only two days earlier had spoken of a recon-in-force in Korea was gone. Now he was completely despondent—as if shrouded in his own darkness. Others in the past had noted the general’s tendency toward major mood swings, but Dulles and Allison were nonetheless stunned by the change in his appearance. “All Korea is lost,” MacArthur proclaimed. “The only thing we can do is get our people safely out of the country.” “I have never seen such a dejected, completely forlorn man as General M
acArthur was that Tuesday morning, June 27, 1950,” Allison later wrote.

  Even more disturbing was MacArthur’s behavior when their plane was delayed for mechanical reasons. The farewell ceremony seemed to drag on and on, even when a message arrived that the secretary of the Army wanted a telecom meeting with the general at 1 P.M., Tokyo time. In those days of more primitive communications, a telecom meeting was like a phone conversation done through talking typewriters that conversed with each other. Both Dulles and Allison sensed that the request was an exceptionally important one, Washington desperately needing to talk to its commander in the field to find out what he thought ought to be done in a major crisis. In order to participate, MacArthur needed to leave Haneda immediately. But to their surprise, the general rather airily told his aides that he was busy seeing Dulles off and Washington could talk to his chief of staff. Dulles was appalled, and he used a ploy to get MacArthur back to work: he had his party paged and told to board the plane. Only then did MacArthur leave for headquarters. Thereupon Dulles and his party returned to the VIP room to wait a few hours more. It would be during that teleconference, Allison later learned, that the Truman administration decided to commit U.S. air and sea power to Korea. It was not a comforting beginning.

  To some it recalled a comparable lack of preparation in Douglas MacArthur’s command before the start of the war with Japan, when he had systematically underestimated the ability of the Japanese to strike at American possessions in the Pacific, and then, because his own command structure was so poorly prepared, had allowed the bombers under his command at Wake Island to be destroyed by Japanese bombers while they sat on the ground nine long hours after the Pearl Harbor attack. “Few commanders of any nationality could have borne so large a responsibility for the United States military debacle in the Philippines in 1941–42 yet escaped any share of it,” wrote the British historian Max Hastings. “Fewer still could have abandoned his doomed command on Bataan, and escaped to safety with his own court, complete even unto personal servants, and made good the claim that his own value to his country surpassed that of a symbolic sacrifice alongside his men.” The rules that governed other men never really applied to Douglas MacArthur.