The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  Each of them carried a long list of grievances against the other. It was symbolic of their relationship that whatever one partner wanted was invariably inconvenient for the other at that moment, although more often than not in those years the needier partner was Mao. The fact that the Soviets were not giving the Chinese much in the way of aid during World War II was known in America at the time, because Communist officials in Yenan complained quite openly about the lack of help to Western visitors, diplomats, journalists, and members of the Dixie Mission, the American military intelligence operatives from the Office of Strategic Services who had been sent to work with the Chinese Communists, and to push them to do more against the Japanese. (The members of the Mission generally admired the Communists for their military abilities and were privately contemptuous of Chiang’s forces.) Since the end of the Cold War, a great many secret documents—studies ordered up by Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet first secretary during the worst years of the Sino-Soviet split—have become public, and they reflect even greater early tensions in the Mao-Stalin relationship than expected and, on the surface at least, seemingly greater opportunities for American foreign policy, had the United States not been so locked into Chiang.

  Was it inevitable at that moment in the history of the two nations, the United States and China, that the chances for peace would be missed? Perhaps Truman’s Washington and Mao’s Beijing, with greater wisdom and just a little geopolitical luck, might have stumbled into an uncomfortable, uneasy accord in that period, buying some time until the nerve ends were less sensitive. Perhaps the cruelest irony of all was that the main consensus American foreign policy conclusion at the time was that the Communist world was monolithic. If anything, the miscalculations of both sides at this moment helped make the Communist world seem more monolithic than it really was. If there was a sad epitaph for that period it was that to some degree the Americans and the Chinese had both ended up for a time playing Stalin’s game.

  The tensions between Stalin and Mao and their two countries, always considerable, had grown ever larger as Mao came closer and closer to taking power. Stalin was never in any rush to risk Soviet resources, Soviet interests, or Russian blood in the cause of the larger Communist family. He trusted only what he conquered with his Army and controlled once he had put his secret police in place. The idea of a vast Communist state on his border, flowering in a historically alien country, under a regime that had come to power without his help and owed him nothing, did not thrill him. Thus Mao was a potential rival even before there was a real rivalry. Stalin had long kept Mao at arm’s length; he had first invited him to Moscow in July 1947, not by chance at the moment when Chiang’s armies were still on the offensive and Mao seemed, to outsiders at least, at the low point of his fortunes. Mao quickly declined to go, believing that if he went, Stalin would try to extract unwanted concessions from him.

  Then in late 1947, as the tide steadily began to turn in favor of the Communists, Stalin began to back Mao more openly, but gave him virtually nothing in the way of aid. By January 1948, Stalin confided to Milovan Djilas that he had been wrong earlier in pushing Mao to work out an accord with Chiang. The Americans, Stalin added, were preoccupied with Europe, and while they would never let the Greek Communists win in their then ongoing civil war, Asia was a secondary sphere for them. The Americans would be unlikely to invest their military forces on the Asian mainland, he said. In May 1948, Mao, sure victory was at hand, sent word that he finally wanted to come to Moscow and meet with Stalin. What he desired was recognition from the Soviet bloc at the moment when Chiang finally collapsed. Stalin instead replied that “the revolutionary war in China is in its decisive phase, and that Chairman Mao, as its military leader, would do better not to leave his post.” Hopefully, he added, “Chairman Mao will reconsider his intentions.” As Goncharov, Lewis, and Xue wrote, “To Mao, Stalin’s ever-so-polite letter was a rebuke. As Communist military commander, he could be presumed to know much better than Stalin if this was a good time for a journey to Moscow, and he needed no instructions on the matter.”

  In late 1948, Mao pushed for a meeting in Moscow on several occasions, and each time Stalin held back. Instead in January 1949, Stalin sent Anastas Mikoyan, one of his most trusted aides, to China, but only under a cloak of absolute secrecy. Stalin still feared what might happen in case the Americans lashed out in the final days. What Mao sensed of Stalin, right down to the final warning that he should go slowly as his forces crossed the Yangtze, was more than anything else his timidity.

  Mao was all too aware in those years that Stalin was suspicious of him. Privately he would joke—if that is the word—that he did not enjoy Stalin’s trust, and that he was considered a rightist and opportunist by Moscow. Still, he needed Stalin’s approval and wanted to be received with some form of honor in the Soviet capital. In April 1949, Mao again passed the word to Lieutenant General Ivan Kovalev, Stalin’s personal representative in China, that he wanted to visit. This time, though Stalin again turned him down, the response from Moscow was much warmer and there was praise for him as the leader of a great Communist revolution. Kovalev later noted that Mao seemed quite relieved by the warmer tone of the answer. According to Kovalev, Mao raised his hands and shouted out, “Long live Comrade Stalin! Long live Comrade Stalin! Long live Comrade Stalin!” Finally, in December 1949, he got the coveted Moscow invitation, but only as one of many leaders in the Communist world and not to celebrate his victory in China, extraordinary though it was, but to commemorate Stalin’s enduring rule on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.

  Part of the problem was that Mao was hardly what the Soviet leadership wanted. He was too proud of his accomplishments and of being Chinese, too independent-minded, seeming to believe that, by leading this great revolution, he was already a major figure, not a supplicant. His very victory had demanded independence, but that same independence made Moscow nervous. If he came to Moscow, would he be sufficiently grateful? The Russians were not even sure he was by their reckoning a real Communist. He was, Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov reported back to Stalin after one meeting, clever, but a peasant: “Of course he is far from being Marxist—he confessed to me that he had never read Das Kapital.” Reading the translation of Mao’s theoretical views, Stalin had been appalled: “What kind of Marxism is this! This is feudalism!” Privately Stalin believed that Mao might harbor what he termed “rightist tendencies” that might one day lead him to be soft on the Americans.

  As Mao came closer to taking power, a good deal of jockeying continued between the leaderships of the two countries. The Soviets were trying to find out what Mao felt about Tito, the Yugoslav leader who was about to be drummed out of the Communist family for his perceived dissidence and independence. The Soviets feared there were parallels between Tito, who had already broken with Moscow, and Mao. Moscow, in fact, always suspected Mao of being a closet Titoist, and in time he would indeed become the greatest Titoist of them all. But whatever Mao’s reservations about Stalin, the Chinese badly needed some form of international recognition, someone to legitimize them on the world stage, and there was no one else to turn to. Though Stalin privately continued to hold back on other aspects of friendship, on October 2, 1949, the day after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Soviets became the first nation to recognize the new Communist regime.

  IF THERE WERE historic forces working against a true alliance, the relationship was made much more difficult by Stalin’s megalomania and by the fact that both men ruled nations where there was no opposition party, and where sycophancy was something of an art form. By 1949, Stalin was already the Great Stalin, and the beneficiary, as it were, of a relentless, all-encompassing cult of personality, while Mao was a relative ingenue in the creation of such a cult: the Soviet cult of personality had already been in effect for at least twenty years. According to the historian Walter Laquer, it had started in December 1929, at the time of Stalin’s fiftieth birthday. Leonid Leonov, a prominent Russian writer of the time, typica
lly wrote of the great man that “the day would come when all mankind would revere him and history would recognize him as the starting point of time, not Jesus Christ.”

  But Mao would soon rival him in the art of totalitarian self-glorification. He might at the beginning have had his doubts about the cult of personality, but he soon came to understand the greatest truth of self-glorification: like so many other dictators, he discovered that what was good for the leader was good for the revolution as well. Besides, as he emerged ever more clearly as China’s sole leader, he came to see himself as nothing less than a modern Chinese emperor. His favorite among his imperial predecessors, according to his doctor, Li Zhisui, was Emperor Zhou, a mythical tyrant supposedly much despised by most Chinese because of his appalling cruelty, a man who liked to mutilate and then display the bodies of potential rivals as a warning to other enemies. About his own special role in history and about his own greatness Mao was absolutely sure. It was something he spoke of constantly. “He was the greatest leader, the greatest emperor of them all—the man who had unified the country and would then transform it, the man who was restoring China to its original greatness,” as Dr. Li wrote.

  In some ways he would prove to be very much like Stalin. The more he schemed against those around him, the more he came to believe that they were already scheming against him. He gradually got rid of all potential rivals, no matter their loyalty to him, to the Party, or to the revolution. As the cult grew, as the ordinary peasants of China came to revere Mao ever more, he became ever more distanced from them in lifestyle. No head of a capitalist society could have lived with more privilege or with more of his country’s resources diverted to him. Each province chief built a villa for him—he was always on the move, fearing he would become too much of a target for his enemies if he stayed in one place too long. No head of state in a free society could have lived as a comparable sexual predator, relentlessly devouring young peasant women, who were eager to serve their leader and thus their nation in whatever way he suggested. “Women were served to order, like food,” as Andrew Nathan, a Columbia University scholar, wrote in the introduction to Li Zhisui’s book. In time, his cult of personality grew to even more gothic proportions that Stalin’s. His swim in the Yangtze River, as Laquer wrote, was treated as a turning point in history. “He was,” Laquer wrote, “not only the greatest Marxist of all time, he was the greatest genius who ever lived. He had never been mistaken, everything he said was the truth, every sentence he uttered was worth 10,000 sentences [of everyone else].” One Chinese poem summed it all up: “Father is close/ Mother is close/ But neither is as close as Chairman Mao.”

  His days as a supplicant had been difficult for Mao, and he came to hate Stalin for the way the Soviet leader had treated him. Mao was not a man to take second-class treatment lightly, or to forgive or forget, though when he finally evened the score, it was with Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev. He once held a summit meeting with Khrushchev in his swimming pool, forcing the Soviet leader, who did not swim, to wear a life preserver during the session. It had been his way, he told his doctor, “of sticking a needle up his ass.”

  IN DECEMBER 1949, Mao finally made his trip to Moscow. Harrison Salisbury, of the New York Times, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Moscow in those days, remembered the shroud of silence that Stalin had already placed in the preceding months over the news of Mao’s coming victory. There was virtually no mention of it in the controlled press; “a snippet on the back page of Pravda, or a few paragraphs inside Izvestia. The word ‘China’ hardly appeared.” Now, with Mao on his way to Moscow, there was more open evidence of the cold Soviet shoulder. Stalin’s seventieth birthday was self-evidently a great moment of celebration in the Communist world and an occasion not to be shared with any other event or person. On December 6, Mao set out by train for the Soviet capital. The war was barely over and he was fearful of attacks by Nationalist dissidents. He traveled in an armored car, with sentries posted every hundred meters along the tracks. In Shenyang, the largest city in the northeast, Mao disembarked and checked to see if there were posters of him. There were very few, it turned out, and a great many of Stalin—the work of Gao Gang, whom Mao saw as a pro-Soviet dissident. Mao was furious and ordered that the car carrying gifts for Stalin from Gao be uncoupled from the tram and the gifts returned to him.

  Mao’s arrival in Moscow on December 16 was an edgy one. He was treated not as the leader of a great revolution bringing into the Communist orbit one of the world’s great nations but rather, as the historian Adam Ulam has written, “as if he were, say, the head of the Bulgarian party.” V. M. Molotov and Nikolai Bulganin, both senior politburo members, came to the station to meet him. Mao had laid out a handsome luncheon buffet. He asked the two Soviet leaders to have a drink with him. They refused—based on protocol, Molotov said. They also refused to sit and share the food. Then Mao asked them to accompany him to the residence where he was scheduled to stay. Again they refused. There was no major celebration or festive party for him. It was as if Mao was now to learn his place in Stalin’s constellation, the real Communist universe; if he was a fraternal brother, then he should know that there would always be one Communist brother who was so much bigger than all the others. One of Khrushchev’s aides told his boss that someone named “Matsadoon” was in town. “Who?” the perplexed Khrushchev asked. “You know that Chinaman,” the aide answered. That was how they saw him: that Chinaman. And that was how they treated him. The main reception for the Chinese delegation was held not in the Main Hall of the Kremlin but in the old Metropole Hotel, “the usual place for entertaining visiting minor capitalist dignitaries,” in Ulam’s words.

  Things did not get better after the first reception. For days on end Mao was isolated, waiting for Stalin to arrange meetings. No one else could meet with him until Stalin had, and Stalin was taking his time. When Mao first arrived in Moscow, he announced that China looked forward to a partnership with Russia, but he emphasized as well that he wanted to be treated as an equal. Instead he was being taught a lesson each day. He had become, in Ulam’s words, “as much captive as guest.” As such, he shouted at the walls, convinced that Stalin had bugged the house: “I am here to do more than eat and shit.” He hated Russian food. At one point Kovalev, his contact man, dropped by to visit him. Mao pointed outside at Moscow and said, “Bad, bad!” What did he mean by that? Kovalev asked. Mao said he was angry at the Kremlin. Kovalev insisted he had no right to criticize “the Boss,” and that he, Kovalev, would now have to make a report.

  When Stalin finally met Mao, they proved to have a remarkable mutual instinct for misunderstanding. “Why didn’t you seize Shanghai?” Stalin asked, for the Chinese had taken their time before entering the city. “Why should we have?” Mao answered. “If we’d captured the city, we would have had to take on the responsibility for feeding the six million inhabitants.” Stalin, already fearing that Mao favored peasants over workers, was appalled. Here was proof of it, workers in a city left to suffer.

  The trip to Moscow was in all ways a disaster, and Mao would have a long memory for the way he had been treated. In economic and military aid, he got very little from his negotiations on that first trip—a paltry $300 million in Soviet arms over five years, or $60 million a year. To make matters worse, there were also some Chinese territorial concessions that had to be thrown in. The lack of Russian generosity staggered the Chinese. “Like taking meat from the mouth of a tiger,” Mao would say years later. For Mao, very much aware of the scale of his great triumph at home and what it meant in terms of history, the treatment by the Soviets had essentially been a humiliation, but one he had been forced to accept without complaint. “It is no wonder that Mao conceived, if he had not nurtured it before, an abiding hatred of the Soviet Union,” Adam Ulam wrote.

  ON SEPTEMBER 30, 1950, Kim Il Sung, somewhat humbled by events in the South, and warned off by the Russians when he asked for troops, attended a reception at the Chinese embassy in Pyongyang cel
ebrating the first anniversary of the creation of the Chinese People’s Republic. There he asked Beijing’s representatives to send the Thirteenth Chinese Army Corps to fight in Korea. The next day, along with Pak Hon Yong, ostensibly the South Korean Communist leader, he sent a letter to Mao asking for troops. To expedite the process, Pak flew to Beijing with the letter, which pointed out that the North would have won the war except for the action of the United States. Now their situation, he said, was “most grave.” “It is difficult for us to cope with the crisis with our own strength,” the letter said and ended with an urgent request for Chinese troops.

  On October 2, Mao began to meet with the Standing Committee of the Politburo, an elite part of the whole. Even the delay of a day, he warned, could be crucial to the future. The issue, he said, was not whether they would send troops, but when, and who would be the commander. Lin Biao, commander of the vaunted Fourth Field Army, who knew the general terrain quite well, was the logical choice. But Lin was ticketed for medical treatment in the Soviet Union, both as an end in itself and as a cover for not commanding the troops. So Mao decided on Peng Dehuai. Like Lin, he was an old and trusted comrade in arms. He and Mao had served together since 1928. Mao felt that Peng was exactly the right man because he would share Mao’s views politically, and would, despite any private doubts he harbored, accept the post when asked, whatever the terrible dangers in store for his men.

  Mao was, some of the men around him thought, almost emotionally immune to the loss of life in a war like this. It was simply the price that had to be paid. China had millions of people, and was on its way to greatness; it could sacrifice far more of them than other countries. He could even accept the possible American use of a nuclear weapon. He once shocked Nehru by saying that the atomic bomb was a “paper tiger.” “The atomic bomb is nothing to be afraid of,” he told the Indian leader. “China has millions of people. They cannot be bombed out of existence. If someone else can drop an atomic bomb, I can too. The death of ten or twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of.” If his political vision demanded a war, then the next great question was: When should China enter the war? When would the forces still gathering along the Manchurian border be ready? The men at the October 2 meeting, led by Mao, chose October 15, two weeks away. By chance, it was also the date being selected by Truman and MacArthur for their first meeting, to be held on Wake Island.