The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

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  WHEN THE NORTH KOREANS crossed the thirty-eighth parallel in full force, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur’s attention was then focused almost exclusively on political developments in Japan, where he was doing an exceptional job trying to shape a defeated country into a more egalitarian, democratic society. Right up to the beginning of World War II, Japan had reflected an odd combination of economic and military modernity blended with social and political feudalism. MacArthur was trying with considerable success to create balancing forces, to bring land reform, labor unions, and rights for women into play. He had been perfectly cast for the occasion—Japan after the defeat in the Pacific was like a nation whose god had failed and now sought a new, more secular one; MacArthur, if nothing else, had always wanted to be idolized, and now he had found an entire nation ready to see him as a kind of deity. His touch, for so instinctively autocratic and self-absorbed a man, had been surprisingly nimble in dealing with a defeated nation. He had been shrewd enough to work through the emperor, thus reinforcing the authority of both of them. Though his own instincts were more conservative than liberal and he was aligned with deeply conservative political elements in America, he had been a surprisingly liberal modern American deity in Japan. Though he had been and would continue to be a serious domestic critic of the New Deal, in Japan he had turned enthusiastically to a group of young liberal New Dealers and given them surprising freedom in shaping postwar Japan. They had had that freedom, their leader Charles Kades believed, in no small part because it was the right thing to do and created a better society, but also in part because the more they changed Japan from the old nation to the new, the greater MacArthur’s role in the creation would be, the more it would be his Japan.

  The changes in Japan, and the coming of a Japanese Peace Treaty, absorbed almost all of the general’s working day. He was paying very little attention to the American troops under his command—the occupation army—by then a military force that bore only a passing resemblance to the formidable army that had defeated the Japanese in the Pacific. That his troops were understrength, poorly equipped, and increasingly poorly trained did not seem to bother MacArthur. He paid even less attention to South Korea, the southern half of the former Japanese colony, liberated and divided by American and Russian troops in 1945, the Americans taking their sphere of influence in the south, the Russians theirs in the north. South Korea interested him so little that he had visited it but once—and then briefly—since it had been created. He had ignored the repeated pleas of General John Hodge, the American commander in South Korea who wanted the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (or SCAP), as MacArthur was officially known, far more involved there. Instead, MacArthur ordered the general to use his own best judgment. “I am not sufficiently familiar with the local situation to advise you intelligently, but I will support whatever decision you make in this matter,” he said in reply to one of these requests.

  It became clear that MacArthur wanted no part of Korea in the period from 1945 to 1950. There were countless cables coming across his desk from Hodge, pleading for his help or his advice: “I urgently request your active participation in my difficult position…” Faubion Bowers, who was a principal MacArthur aide in those days because of his ability to speak Japanese, remembered Hodge deciding on his own to come to see MacArthur, and being kept waiting for hours, hoping to see the general, only to be told that he was to take care of Korea himself. “I wouldn’t put my foot in Korea. It belongs to the State Department,” MacArthur told Bowers later as he was driven home. “They wanted it and got it. They have jurisdiction. I don’t. I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot barge pole. The damn diplomats make the wars and we win them. Why should I save their skin? I won’t help Hodge. Let them help themselves.” His single visit there had been for the inauguration of the newly installed South Korean president, Syngman Rhee, at which time he had told Rhee rather casually, if grandly—for he had checked with no one in Washington about this pledge—that the United States would defend South Korea if it was attacked, “as we would California.”

  His admirers and his staff were unanimous in describing his vigor and energy, rare for a man of seventy. Yet among those who were not part of his inner group, there were serious concerns about his age and health. Even as Japan’s defeat became apparent in 1945, some senior military men had already begun to worry about him. General Joseph Stilwell, watching MacArthur accept the Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay that September, had been struck by how badly his hands shook. At first, Stilwell thought it was nerves, but General Walter Krueger, one of MacArthur’s senior officers, had assured him it was Parkinson’s. Still, thought Stilwell, “it looked like hell.” There were other signs that his health might be failing. His attention span seemed limited and sometimes there were significant lapses in it, and he was slow to understand the seriousness of a new challenge. His hearing was known to have slipped badly, and knowledgeable staff aides believed that the supreme commander did not readily hold staff meetings for just that reason. Others believed it was the reason that when visitors were granted audiences with him he tended toward monologues, because he could not hear what others were saying and could not easily engage in two-sided conversations. But older or not, able to work at the level demanded of a combat commander or not, he remained an icon, one with a vast store of political capital. There were all kinds of glitches in his long and often distinguished career, moments when he had been far less than a brilliant commander and his lesser, more vainglorious self had shown too readily, and others had paid a price for his failings, but he was in 1950 still a formidable figure, someone who had been a famous and daring commander as far back as World War I, had conducted his campaign against the Japanese in the Pacific during World War II with shrewd, careful use of his limited forces, and was, on the occasion of the outbreak of the Korean War, doing an admirable job of modernizing Japan.

  If MacArthur had little interest in Korea, his attitude toward that unfortunate country was all too typical of his fellow countrymen. Korea was connected neither to the American political process nor to the American psyche. China had long fascinated Americans, many of whom felt a deep, if curious, paternalism toward the poor, struggling Chinese. Japan was alternately admired and feared. Korea, on the other hand, did not fascinate, or even interest, Americans. A missionary named Homer Hulbert wrote in 1906 that the Koreans “have been frequently maligned and seldom appreciated. They are overshadowed by China on the one hand in respect to numbers, and Japan on the other hand in respect to wit. They are neither good merchants like the one, nor good fighters like the other. And yet they are by far the pleasantest people in the East to live amongst. Their failings are such as flow in the wake of ignorance everywhere, and the bettering of their opportunities would bring swift betterment to their condition.” In the ensuing four decades American interest in Korea had not increased greatly. The Russians had entered the Pacific War belatedly, and when the war ended abruptly with the use of the atomic bombs, Korea had been divided at the thirty-eighth parallel, almost as an afterthought, the division done in the most casual way at the last minute at the Pentagon. The first American commanders to arrive there, utterly unaware of how much the Koreans loathed their Japanese masters, and how cruel the Japanese occupation had been, had at first been willing to use the Japanese police forces to keep the Koreans in line. General Hodge, the first American general who commanded there after the war, a blunt, raw, direct man, had liked neither Korea nor the Koreans, whom he described as being “the same breed of cat as the Japanese.” The American presence in Korea might have begun in the most casual, indeed careless way, but it brought a powerful new player into the orbit of a country whose geography, rather than its natural wealth, had made it for years the target of powerful, aggressive neighbors. What was new in an old equation, as the historian Bruce Cumings has pointed out, was the arrival of a fresh new power, the United States. It was there in no small part in the years after 1945 because the Russians we
re also there, and then, soon enough, because Korea’s security was directly tied to Japan’s security.

  The marriage of Korea, or more accurately of South Korea, to the Americans, which started in 1945 and was more or less a shotgun affair, a product of the Cold War, was therefore not an easy one. It brought an angry client state, still bitter about its recently ended colonial period and embittered about being severed in half, under the hegemony of an awkward new superpower that was not at all sure it wanted to be in the business of empire. To the Koreans the end of World War II and Japanese colonialism had not brought, as so many had hoped, a great new breath of freedom and a chance to reconstruct their country to their own political contours. That where there had been only one Korea there were now two was a grievous injustice by itself in their eyes; rather than being able to shape their own destiny on their own terms, they had fallen once again under the control of others. The first thing that the people in the South realized was that their country, or more accurately their half country, was controlled by people who lived thousands of miles away across a vast ocean, and had almost no interest or knowledge of the country whose future they would now determine. It was in the beginning a relationship filled with tensions and misunderstandings. Only as the Cold War intensified did the relationship become one of genuine mutual value and interest. Without the threat of global Communism, America cared nothing about Korea; with that threat Americans were willing to fight and die for it.

  Korea was a small, proud country that had the misfortune to lie in the path of three infinitely larger, stronger, more ambitious powers—China, Japan, and Russia. Each of them wanted to use it either as an offensive base from which to assault one of the others or as a defensive shield to negate the possible aggressive designs of the other two. Long before June 1950, Korea’s formidable neighbors had all at some moment favored the right to invade Korea in what they thought of as a defensive move—a precautionary step—against one of their rivals. As the unfortunate geography of Poland placed it between Germany and Russia, so Korea’s geography was to no small degree its fate. Syngman Rhee, the eventual president of South Korea, liked to cite an old Korean proverb that went: “A shrimp is crushed in the battle of the whales.”

  For much of its history the influence of China had fallen over Korea more heavily than that of other hostile countries, but the Sino-Japanese war of 1894–95 signaled the temporary end of Chinese influence there, as Japan, an ascending power, a nation that was industrializing quickly and was traditionally militaristic, began what was to become a formidable bid for regional domination—in effect the creation of a new Japanese empire. In 1896, Russia—its sheer size concealing a deep social, political, and economic rot—made a compact with an ever more aggressive Japan, dividing their influence over Korea at (ironically) the thirty-eighth parallel. If Russia was a nation that seemed more powerful than it actually was, Japan seemed less powerful than it was. Their agreement would prove the most temporary of solutions.

  In February 1904, the Japanese struck against the Russian fleet, eventually destroying it at the Battle of the Tsushima Straits; that battle took place after the Japanese had inflicted comparable defeats on the Russian army in the Pacific and in parts of Russian-occupied Manchuria. The Japanese later justified their assault on Russia’s forces in the Far East by pointing to the danger a Russified Korea held out for them. Rikitaro Fujisawa, a prominent Japanese political figure, quoted a friend as saying that the Japanese had to strike against the Russians, because “Korea lies like a dagger, ever pointed towards the heart of Japan,” words that could have easily been spoken nearly half a century later, by the most senior American national security officials. Then he added in his own words, “Korea in the possession of Russia, or even a weak and corrupt Korea which might fall any time an easy prey to the Russian Eagle would place Japan’s destiny in the hands of the unscrupulous ‘Colossus of the North.’ Japan could not accept such a fate. That the Russo-Japanese War was not only a defensive war for Japan but Japan’s struggle for her very existence as an independent nation is too obvious to require either elucidation or explanation.” It was a great way to justify an offensive war—the Koreans, not the devil, made them do it.

  It seemed to be part of Korea’s national destiny to have little say about its own future. The peacemaker in the Russo-Japanese War was not a Korean but the president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, who went on to win a Nobel Prize for his efforts, efforts that had very little to do with any concept of greater good for the Koreans. Roosevelt represented a new, ever more muscular America just beginning to manifest itself in a kind of subconscious imperialist impulse. He had been an enthusiastic advocate of the Spanish-American War in 1898, which had brought the United States the Philippines as a colony. Roosevelt was very much a man of his time: he believed in and in fact popularized the concept of the white man’s burden, that is, the obligation of strong, dependable, worthy (Christian) Caucasian powers to rule the less reliable, less worthy non-white world, and he believed in the parallel duty of the non-white world to let itself be ruled. The one country he exempted from his view of Asian nations and peoples as essentially inferior was Japan. “The Japs interest me and I like them,” he wrote a friend at the time. After all, they were, except in skin color, size, and shape of eyes, perilously like Anglo-Saxons—hardworking, disciplined, organized, muscular in their own way, and imperially aggressive.

  Roosevelt was impressed with the Japanese as being the kind of can-do nation he could admire, “entitled to stand on an absolute equality with all the other peoples of the civilized world.” All of this put Korea, in the words of Robert Myers, a writer and former intelligence officer with considerable expertise in Korean affairs, “in a position not unlike that of a newborn calf, defenseless before the Japanese imperial wolf.” The only country that might have made a difference, given Korea’s unfortunate geography, was the very distant United States. In fact, back in 1882 the kingdom of Korea had made a treaty with the United States (and some European nations as well) that called for them to come to Korea’s defense if it was attacked. That aid was to remain altogether theoretical: Korea was too far away; the American Navy at the time of the Russo-Japanese War was pitifully small; and in any case, Teddy Roosevelt had his own priorities for Asia, and Korea was not one of them. The United States was not interested in helping Korea but in securing its own brand-new colonial domain in the Philippines. So with covert American agreement, the Japanese were allowed to control Korea ever more tightly, as a “protectorate” after the Russo-Japanese War, and then, in 1910, by open, brazen annexation—as a full-fledged Japanese colony.

  Because he spoke such good English, the young Syngman Rhee had been chosen by some of his countrymen to visit Theodore Roosevelt in the summer of 1905 just as the president was about to negotiate the Russian-Japanese Peace Treaty. Rhee wanted Roosevelt’s help in stopping Japan’s colonization of his country. In the words of the journalist-historian Joseph Goulden, Roosevelt offered Rhee a dose of “polite and totally misleading doubletalk.” He knew that the pro-Japanese elements who ran the Korean embassy in Washington would give Rhee no help; and he did not mention that, even as they were talking, Secretary of State William Howard Taft was on his way to Tokyo to work out a secret treaty giving the Japanese control of Manchuria and Korea, with the Japanese in return pledging the United States a free hand in the Philippines. No wonder that Rhee eventually became, in the eyes of his American associates, so neurotic and distrustful. America betrayed him more than once and lied to him systematically. Eventually, the Japanese, who renamed Korea Chosen, initiated a brutal colonial reign that lasted almost forty years. The United States, Roosevelt later wrote in his memoirs, could not do “for the Koreans what they were utterly unable to do for themselves.” The Japanese colonization of Korea would be an unusually cruel one, but it attracted little attention outside Korea’s borders.

  Rhee himself stayed on in America, received a remarkable education for a Korean of his generation, a
nd became a one-man Korean truth squad, with just enough connections to a few well-placed Americans, many of them church-connected, to reach other, more politically influential figures. If those associations gave him a good deal of access, and allowed him to press the case for his country’s freedom, he always fell short of genuine influence. He had attended graduate school at Princeton as a doctoral candidate in political science, becoming a favorite of its then president, Woodrow Wilson. Rhee was a regular at the informal social gatherings the Wilsons held in their home, where students came together around the Wilson family piano and sang. Rhee did not sing, but he liked to share in the warmth of an informal American evening, and Wilson seemed both to like and admire him, introducing him to strangers on occasion as “the future redeemer of Korean independence.”

  But the Wilson who presided at Princeton and the Wilson who presided over the United States a little later, and who eventually brought America into World War I, proved to be two very different men. The postwar Paris Peace Conference, which was where Wilson hoped to create a new world order, was among other things supposed to grant colonized countries the right of self-determination. No one was more excited about this prospect than Wilson’s old friend and protégé Rhee: at this most august gathering the freedom of his country was going to be raised by his old mentor, who had once seemed to anoint him as the leader of a new, independent Korea. To Rhee, this was the moment he had been waiting for. He hoped to leave America for Paris, to lobby on behalf of his countrymen to his great friend, to loosen the Japanese fist. But Wilson wanted no part of him in Paris. The president, as it happened, needed Japan as a player in Asia, and besides, Japan had chosen sides well during the war, and so was one of the victorious allies, ready to inherit German rights in China. Rhee thus learned the first rule of global warfare: nations that ended up on the winning side got to keep their colonies; those on the losing side had to surrender them. The State Department was told not to give Rhee a passport.