The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  In early September, Mao gave a speech to an important party meeting that reflected his decision to intervene. The United States, he believed, would turn out to be weaker than anyone expected. It would be waging an unjust war of aggression, and this would work against the morale of its troops and their battlefield performance. America, he said, had formidable divisions politically and economically at home; it was isolated from other nations and so vulnerable to world opinion. Yes, it could produce a great deal of steel and armaments, but that would not be enough. Its supply lines were far too extended, from Berlin to Korea, reflecting the fact that its geopolitical perimeter was stretched over two vast oceans. He saw America very much through his own political bias. America’s young men had fought poorly in the early days in Korea, he believed, not because the world’s atomic superpower had let its non-nuclear weaponry slip, but because these were working-class kids fighting for capitalist aims in which they did not believe, and thus less pure of heart and motivation than the soldiers of China. The level of their fighting ability in the early days of the Korean War, he said, was below that of “Germany and Japan during World War II.” He did not fear the American’s atomic bomb; if they used it, he said, “I will respond with my hand grenade.”

  His decision that China should enter the war was hardly an easy one. He slept poorly. He would often sit by himself well into the early morning hours, smoking endless cigarettes, just staring at maps of Korea and China, as if waiting for some kind of ultimate truth to emerge. But the fateful decision was always clear. China had to enter the war. Taiwan was crucial in all his reckoning. To Mao and others in the Chinese leadership, Taiwan was part of China. Now MacArthur was referring to it as an unsinkable aircraft carrier, which made it de facto American property. To Mao that meant a legitimate part of Chinese territory was seen by his sworn enemy as a weapon aimed against his country. For him that meant the last battle of the Chinese civil war had not yet been fought—something few Americans in power understood. Yet an amphibious landing against a well-defended island—protected by the awesome Seventh Fleet—was almost inconceivable for so primitive an Army. Already one amphibious assault against an offshore island had gone badly, because of the Communists’ lack of air and sea power; it had taken place near the end of the civil war and had proved one of the Communists’ worst defeats of that war. Mao was pushing the Russians for airplanes and instructors to build up his Air Force as quickly as possible, but for the moment he could not move against Taiwan.

  That made Korea all the more attractive. There the confrontation logistically favored the Chinese. Even though they had bases in Japan, American troops pushing north would be strung out, extremely difficult to resupply, and very vulnerable because of the nature of the terrain and weather. The Chinese would have a vast advantage in manpower; Mao could easily put in play an Army four times as large as that of the Americans, and he was sure that his troops would fight bravely and with great discipline. He did not take the ROKs seriously as a fighting force. Against the Americans he hoped to avoid direct confrontation when the enemy was looking for a fight; he preferred to strike when U.S. troops were at their most exposed and vulnerable. He believed that a confrontation with the United States was inevitable, and as such he wanted to pick the location. In addition, Mao’s own political calculations were critical in his decision-making. If he defeated the Americans in Korea, and he was sure he would, it would greatly strengthen his political control over all of China after so long and difficult a civil war. Many people in the Chinese politburo thought this was precisely the wrong time to enter a war, because the nation was exhausted and still divided, its finances dreadful, its economy in ruins. War against a rich, powerful country like the United States might only aid China’s domestic enemies. Therefore any ambitious expedition like this should be delayed. Certainly, this was what Western intelligence officials, including the top people at the Central Intelligence Agency, thought the Chinese should think; it was how they would think if they had been Chinese.

  Here Mao’s domination of the politburo was crucial. The other members were seemingly peers, but he was first among nonequals. He was the embodiment of the new Chinese leadership, and they knew it and deferred to him. He was the one, they believed, who had the greatest insight into the truths of both war and politics; he had the ability to see one step ahead, or as Chen Jian, a gifted young historian at the University of Virginia, once said, he was like a great chess player competing with others who only manage to see what he sees a move or two too late. More than ever, after this decision, he became the great leader, the one the others in the politburo saw as a visionary and trusted because they believed he knew the population better than they did. As he pondered what exactly to do about Korea, he slowly came to see the war as a potential asset, a way to show the Chinese people that China was indeed a new revolutionary power on a global stage, which would be a way of extending the party’s control domestically. And in this he would eventually prove right. Despite the terrible costs, financially and in human resources, the decision to enter the Korean War would, to the surprise of Western analysts, make Mao exactly the great visionary leader he imagined himself to be, who towered above everyone else. He intended to prove to ordinary Chinese that the Americans had always been their enemies and that there was no middle ground. The Chinese people who were closest to the Americans and to other foreigners were the wealthiest people in the country, and thus his domestic opponents; a war with the Americans, he believed, would help isolate them. The war was, in addition to everything else, a way of bonding the Chinese people to him. It would help him politicize the population. Later he would joke that there were only one and a half people who were in favor of going in—the half person, he said condescendingly, was Zhou Enlai.

  There were other reasons to go ahead. Entering the war was proof that the new China could no longer be abused and exploited by foreign powers. Selling this idea to a vast percentage of the Chinese people, Mao was sure, would not be that hard; he had a highly nuanced feel for how much they hated the exploitation of their country by foreigners in the past. His propaganda wars had, in fact, already begun. The State Department had published its China White Paper in August 1949. The white paper was designed to relieve pressure at home, to show that the administration had done all that it could to help what was a self-destructive Nationalist government, and that the collapse was Chiang’s own fault. But it was too long and too complicated for ordinary citizens to read, and it only angered the critics, who regarded it as kicking Chiang when he was down. Almost as soon as it was issued, Styles Bridges, Bill Knowland, Pat McCarran, and Kenneth Wherry issued a statement calling it “a 1,054 page whitewash of a do-nothing policy.” In China, Mao understood immediately its unique propaganda value. To him the case that Acheson and the paper’s authors were making—of how much the United States had done for Chiang—was exactly the one he wanted to make too. It was a gift from heaven, absolute documentary evidence of how insidiously the Americans had manipulated and exploited the government of Chiang only for the good of the United States. The Americans, his line went, were never your friends—and he launched a ferocious nationwide propaganda campaign that stunned Washington, a harbinger of the fact that China’s new leaders were in no rush to become friends with the Western colossus. Mao wrote five articles himself attacking the white paper and personally orchestrated the national campaign against it, becoming for a moment a kind of Chinese Madison Avenue man.

  Mao was confident—far too confident, it would turn out—that his soldiers would prevail over the superior technology of the Americans. There was no sham to this, no touch of cynicism. This is not just what he said, but what he truly believed, and he never altered this view of the coming confrontation with the Americans, although by mid-October a debate would be raging with great intensity in the politburo on this question. That was when it became clear that Stalin was going to renege on his promise to provide air cover for China’s troops. In September, the Chinese had played a prolonged
game of high-stakes poker with the Russians over just how much help the Russians were going to offer. Stalin was proving nervous about getting into a larger confrontation with the Americans. He had been surprised by the rapid American response to Kim’s invasion, and it had made him even more cautious than usual. The Russians, like the Chinese, had warned Kim about the possibility of a landing at Inchon. The idea of an American-sponsored military base right up on the Manchurian border was one more nightmare for Stalin, though it looked increasingly likely that that was the way the war might end.

  Now, as the In Min Gun collapsed, Kim Il Sung began to increase the pressure on Stalin to save his army and his country, even though the Russians had told the Koreans from the start that they would not offer combat troops. But perhaps, Stalin told them, the Chinese might. On September 21, a week after Inchon, Stalin’s personal representative to Pyongyang, General Matvei Zakharov, urged Kim to ask for Chinese aid. The North Korean leadership was uneasy with the dependency on the Chinese that this might create, yet all the battlefield news was bad, and there was clearly no acceptable alternative. A week later the North Korean politburo finally held an emergency session at which it unanimously decided that if Seoul fell there would be no way of stopping the UN forces from crossing the parallel, and the North Koreans would need help. Kim then went to see Terenti Shtykov, the Soviet ambassador, and asked him to bring the subject of Russian troops up with Stalin. Shtykov refused to let him ask the question, and in his words a “confused, lost, hopeless and desperate” Kim and his foreign minister, Pak Hon Yong, then sent a letter to Stalin on their own. On October 1, Stalin answered that their best hope was to convince the Chinese to intervene. That night, Kim spoke to the Chinese ambassador and asked for Chinese troops. He also wanted to know whether, if the worst happened, the Chinese would allow the Koreans to set up a government in exile in their northeast.

  A very delicate game was being played out between all three Communist governments. The North Koreans, who had once snubbed the Chinese, now desperately needed their help. The Chinese, thanks to Mao’s political beliefs, had decided to enter the war but did not want to tip their hand yet, because they wanted to maximize their leverage with the Russians, most particularly on the issue of air cover. In late September, the Soviets apparently agreed to supply air cover for the Chinese troops. So the forces that would lead to a terrible collision between the United States and China were now fully in motion. On September 30, two weeks after Inchon, the South Korean Second Division crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, and a week later, on October 7, troops of the American First Cavalry Division crossed it as well, on their way to the capture of Pyongyang, and right after that, involuntarily, their first unhappy meeting, in early November, with the Chinese at Unsan.

  11. UN BREAKOUT AND INVASION OF NORTH KOREA

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  IF THERE WAS an especially cruel irony in what happened next, it was that the very same doubts the State Department’s China Hands had reflected in their reporting (which had so angered the China Lobby)—not just their certainty that Chiang was failing, but their doubts about Mao’s long-term loyalty to the Russians—turned out to be shared by none other than Joseph Stalin. Stalin, the most important player on the Communist side from the fall of Chiang to the start of the Korean War, the man who skillfully manipulated the needs and fears of his two Communist allies, did not in fact trust Mao. He preferred a unified Communist Korea, one that was grateful to him, and utterly dependent upon him, to a divided one. He also wanted as strong a Korean counterforce as he could muster to the Japanese—a nation the Russians had historically feared and that he was sure the Americans would now seek to rearm. Because he distrusted Mao, he was also eager to maximize the tensions between China and the United States, and a war in which they found themselves on opposite sides worked to his advantage.

  In 1949, Joseph Stalin was the dominant figure in the entire Communist world. He had controlled Russia for more than a quarter of a century. Of the leading architects of the Russian Revolution, he was the last one standing. Others might have been more brilliant, more charismatic, better speakers, more original strategists, but he was the greatest apparatchik of them all, the man who seemed to understand best the single enduring truth of that particular revolution: that when it came to the consolidation of power—sustaining it, and making sure that no one did to you what you had just done to your enemies—ideas did not matter much, but police power did. In the world as Stalin knew it, you were either the hunter or the hunted.

  He survived and succeeded because he was the one with the fewest illusions (and perhaps the greatest paranoia), the man who understood best when stage one of the revolution was over and stage two—the consolidation of power—had begun. He was the one who broke the system down to its most elemental truth: there were enemies everywhere, and you removed them not only before they struck at you, but before they even grasped that they were your enemy. It was his greatest strength, the sheer darkness of his soul, that he understood this more quickly than others, and pursued it more cold-bloodedly, with fewer restraints.

  There was a certain inevitability to the darkness that existed between the two superpowers in the years immediately after World War II—two essentially isolationist countries propelled involuntarily to great power status, with vastly differing political and economic systems, each with its own historical strain of paranoia and each now living in a nuclear world. But no small additional part of the tension was the fact that the Soviet leader was Stalin, and he made everything in the Cold War seem infinitely more dangerous and more threatening, so marginal was his innate humanity, and so cruel a man was he. What he ran was a terror machine. It did not matter if you had committed a crime; a suitable crime could always be found for you. It did not matter if you were a completely loyal Communist and a completely faithful Stalinist, a true believer in the cult of his personality. Someone was always listening, ready to betray you, if only to save himself. It was government run by fear and, finally, madness. In the late 1930s, with a Slavophobic Hitler on the rise, Stalin had purged and virtually destroyed the officer corps and leadership of the Red Army, getting rid of 3 of 5 marshals, 15 of 16 army commanders, 60 of 67 corps commanders, 136 of 199 division commanders. Essentially he stripped his country’s defenses and prepared the way for the German invasion to come in 1941. His crimes against his own people were so great as to be essentially beyond measurement. How many people had actually died? Was it a few million, 10 million, perhaps even 40 million? “He was one of those rare terrible dogmatists capable of destroying nine tenths of the human race to ‘make happy’ the one tenth,” wrote Milovan Djilas, the former Communist vice president of Yugoslavia, and heir apparent to Tito, who broke with the Communists, spent time in prison, and eventually wrote one of the most penetrating early insider portraits of Stalin. Djilas saw him as the greatest criminal of all time: “Every crime was possible to Stalin for there was not one he had not committed. Whatever standards we use to take his measure…to him will fall the glory the greatest criminal in history. For in him were joined the criminal senselessness of a Caligula with the refinement of a Borgia and the brutality of a Tsar Ivan the Terrible.”

  The relationship between Stalin and Mao, going back to the early days of China’s civil war, had been one of almost total distrust and abiding mutual suspicion. These two men would eventually be considered among the leading mass murderers produced by a brutal system in an unusually violent age. That they disliked and distrusted each other was not surprising. Of Stalin, it could be said that he was the ultimate example of how dark the human spirit could become. Of Mao, it could be said that his leadership of a weak political faction in the 1920s, destined, it seemed, to be destroyed by far more powerful enemies, his bringing it to power, was one of the most remarkable political accomplishments of the twentieth century. But the skills of his leadership in ascent were in time exceeded by the harshness, cruelty, and finally, increasing madness he displayed during his years in power. “Revolution is not a
dinner party,” he once said. He would in time give ample evidence of that and of the personal corruption as well as the derangement that came with total power.

  Each leader thought of himself as a Communist, but each was very much a nationalist as well. There might be, on the occasions they got together, talk of fraternal Communism and how it bonded two great nations and the world’s masses, but the truth was that each looked at the other and saw a potential enemy. From Mao’s perspective, the Soviets had almost always seemed an insular, conservative force, favoring only what helped Russia, with little interest in aiding potential fraternal allies who did not yet hold power. As early as the 1920s, when he was struggling unsuccessfully against Chiang’s forces, Mao believed that the Soviets favored Chiang Kai-shek, and then, as he gradually came to power, Mao had hated their special sponsorship of Gao Gang, a member of the Chinese politburo and regional leader of Manchuria. The Chinese Communists had, he liked to say, repeatedly asked the Russians for arms during the civil war and gotten, in Mao’s phrase, “not even a fart.” To Mao, the Soviets might be Communists, but they were first and foremost Russians. Stalin had liked Chiang, Mao believed, because he was weak, and thus sure to preside over a weak China. To Stalin, Mao might be a Communist, but a most unlikely one, lacking a connection with the proletariat, of which China had little; he was too much like a peasant himself. In the end Stalin simply did not trust the Chinese Communists; they were, he said during World War II, too much like radishes: red on the outside, white on the inside.