During my first months in London, I worked on the AP desk, monitoring Moscow Radio, relaying cables from other foreign bureaus to New York, and familiarizing myself with the problems of covering of what then was the center of diplomatic activity. During my absences on the night trick, leaving the children under the care of a babysitter, Audrey would drive across the Heath to the studio of the noted sculptors Herman and Anna Nonnenmacher, with whom she was studying sculpture. Her lessons were fulfillment of a long-held ambition to enter into the arts. Audrey became a favored protégé of the Nonnenmachers, who were impressed with her talent. They arranged for two of her works to be exhibited at the Royal Institute Galleries, and later, Doris Lindner, a leading British sculptor, accepted her as a student. One of Audrey’s exhibited works was a terra-cotta bust of me, which Lindner remarked “brought out the Neanderthal”—a comment that induced mixed feelings in me. The head was one of the works viewed by the famous portraitist Sir Jacob Epstein, who told Audrey she could become a great sculptor if she would leave her family and devote herself entirely to her art. Fortunately for me, Audrey did not abandon me, although she did subsequently continue her sculpting at an institute in Berlin and later in Moscow.
Soon transferred to the diplomatic beat, I then shuttled between covering the Foreign Office and diplomatic conferences on the European continent. In July 1954, I was in Geneva for the General Conference on Korea and Vietnam, attended by leaders of the belligerents in the two ongoing Asian wars and the major powers. I was to report on the final political spasms of the Korean and French Indochina conflicts. I benefited at the conferences by the presence in Geneva of two long-standing sources, who provided extraordinary insights into the highly confrontational negotiations between the Western and Communist blocs: Chester Ronning, my father-in-law, was serving as head of the Canadian Delegation, and Huang Hua, whom had I had not seen since our meetings in Nanking in 1949. His role at the conference on Indochina proved to be critical.
Following conclusion of the armistice in Korea on July 27, 1953, Huang Hua had served as the chief delegate to the negotiations at Panmunjom on outstanding problems, notably the exchange of prisoners of war. The negotiations lasted from late October until December 14, when Arthur W. Dean, the American delegate, in anger walked out complaining about Huang Hua’s vitriolic denunciations of the United States’ role in the conflict. When the Korean negotiations were transferred on April 26, 1954, to the forum of the conference in Geneva, Premier Zhou Enlai, the head of the Chinese delegation, brought Huang Hua with him as an adviser.
The Korea segment of the conference, which was designed to forge a peace treaty, collapsed shortly after my arrival in Geneva. The conferees were unable to agree on terms for withdrawal of foreign troops from the peninsula through elections that would create a united Korea. Ronning placed much of the blame for the failure of the conference on John Foster Dulles, the U.S. secretary of state. Prior to the conference, Ronning told me, Dulles secretly assured Syngman Rhee, the South Korean president, that the United States would not agree at the conference to anything that he would find unacceptable. Rhee, who had opposed the convening of the conference, favored resumption of military operations against the North Koreans, hoping it would give him control of the entire peninsula. Ronning also related to me how Dulles had impeded progress at the conference by refusing to engage directly with the Chinese delegation. At the reception opening the conference Ronning entered the ceremonial hall walking just behind Dulles. The U.S. secretary was greeted in Chinese with outstretched hand by Zhou Enlai, who was standing near the door. Dulles, refusing to shake hands, brushed past the Chinese premier, muttering “I cannot . . . “ He then turned and strode out of the room with hands locked behind his back. Shocked, Ronning hastened forward, grasped Zhou’s hand, and greeted him in Chinese, mitigating the insult and loss of face. In the absence of formal diplomatic relations, Dulles had decided not to shake hands with the Chinese leader. Zhou Enlai never forgave the Dulles snub, nor did he forget Ronning’s compensating gesture. At the closed final plenary session of the conference on June 15, when all hope of an agreement had faded, Zhou Enlai proposed that the conference be adjourned only temporarily so that it could be reconvened whenever the chairmen decided a time was propitious for progress. He appealed to the delegations not to extinguish the possibility of arriving at a peace agreement. Ronning for Canada, Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary, and other delegates were supportive of the proposal, but General Walter Bedell Smith, the American delegate, rejected it, arguing that the conference was never intended to be a permanent negotiating body outside the United Nations. Since consensus was required for any action, the conference ended there, and the boundary between North and South Korea was frozen at the thirty-eighth parallel as stipulated in the armistice agreement. It was an arrangement which has endured and served to isolate North Korea, spurring its leaders to an enormous military buildup and toward efforts to develop nuclear weapons.
Although I was not on the ground in the Korean War, as in Indochina, I became privy to the origins of the conflict, the developments which led to the intervention of Chinese Communist troops, and the miscalculations in the conflict on all sides which cost the lives of an estimated five million people. These fatalities included Korean civilians and combatants of the two Koreas, China, the United States, and the fifteen allied nations of the United Nations. American casualties alone, in the three-year war in which 300,000 ground troops were deployed, totaled about 54,000 servicemen dead, 103,000 wounded, and some 8,000 missing. Strangely, despite its enormous costs, overshadowed by the war in Vietnam, the Korean conflict all too soon became the “forgotten war.”
In the war on the Korean peninsula, the coalition of American, South Korean, and other United Nations contingents suffered their most devastating defeat at an early stage when Chinese troops intervened and descended on them in overwhelming force. It was a reverse to be attributed in great part to a military intelligence failure on the part of General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander, and his G-2 deputy, Major General Charles Willoughby. I trace the roots of their failure to what I surmised in January 1948 during a visit to Tokyo when MacArthur was presiding in Japan as Supreme Commander Allied Powers (SCAP).
Posted then in Nanking for the International News Service, I was assigned to visit Tokyo to survey the post–World War II strategic situation in the Pacific. Upon my arrival in the Japanese capital there was a message waiting asking me to meet with MacArthur for an interview that I had not requested. I was told by the general’s aides that the Supreme Commander Allied Powers wanted my impressions of developments in the Chinese Civil War. The general greeted me most cordially in his office on the roof of the Dai Ichi Building and then began questioning me about the evolution of the Civil War on the China mainland. I could see that the general, leaning back in his chair, sucking on his corncob pipe and gazing reflectively at the ceiling, was not intent on what I had to say. He interrupted me to lay out his own views, which took up most of our two-hour meeting. He said he had a solution for bringing about a Nationalist victory. “The United States should give Chiang Kai-shek five hundred bombers and maintain them,” the general said crisply.
I listened to the general bewildered. The Nationalists had already been well supplied with American B-24 and B-25 bombers as well as Canadian Mosquito strike aircraft. This unopposed air power had proven to be virtually ineffectual in combat operations against the Communists. After my meeting with MacArthur I discussed the China Civil War with Willoughby, his G-2. I found Willoughby, like MacArthur, lacking in understanding of what was transpiring on the mainland. Willoughby had an overbearing manner, redolent of his Prussian antecedents. Other members of MacArthur’s staff in talks with me jokingly referred to him as “Sir Charles.” Extreme right wing politically, an admirer of General Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator, Willoughby was contemptuous of the Chinese Communist military. He dismissed Mao’s armies and their commanders as comprising little more than
a guerrilla force. It seemed to me that he was repeating the error he made when he underestimated the capabilities of the Japanese in the battle for Leyte in the Philippines. Looking now at yet another Asian army, he was underestimating the capabilities of the Chinese Communists. Two years later this miscalculation would bring MacArthur and Willoughby to the point of total disaster in battling Mao Zedong’s intervention in the Korean War.
I was in Saigon in the early morning of June 25, 1950, when the North Korean leader Kim Il-sung gave the signal for the invasion of South Korea. The war seemed very distant and unrelated to Indochina even after President Truman, under the banner of the United Nations, committed American forces to the defense of South Korea with MacArthur in overall command. But the war suddenly took on new significance for Indochina on October 25 when Chinese troops intervened in great force. The Chinese struck after MacArthur’s troops crossed the thirty-eighth parallel in pursuit of the collapsing North Korean army and advanced toward the Yalu River bordering China. In Saigon, French and American strategists saw the widening of the war in Korea as a likely prelude to a Chinese Communist invasion of Vietnam. Mao’s divisions were already arrayed along the Indochina border. The last of the French forts had fallen that very month to Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh, and the mountain passes were open to Chinese incursions. As documented in the Pentagon Papers, the National Security Council put forward contingent planning in the event of such an invasion that would have provided for allied naval blockade of China, bombing its lines of communication, and the deployment onto mainland China of Chiang Kai-shek’s forces from Taiwan.
Despite these alarums, I was dubious that Ho Chi Minh would invite the Chinese troops in great force into North Vietnam. Advisers to train his Viet Minh? Yes, but not thousands of Chinese troops who might set up camp in the country indefinitely. For a thousand years, the Vietnamese had resisted any incursions by the Chinese, their traditional enemies. Still fresh for them was the memory of the looting of North Vietnam by Chinese Nationalist troops in the post–World War II occupation. The extent of lingering Vietnamese distrust of the Chinese would again manifested itself in 1979 when China and Vietnam fought a brief and inclusive war, with heavy casualties on both sides, over rival claims to the Paracel Islands, border demarcation, and the ousting by Vietnamese forces of the Peking-supported Pol Pot regime in Cambodia.
As events unfolded, Mao did not invade Indochina, but also he did not allow his distractions in Korea to diminish his aid program for Ho Chi Minh. If anything, Chinese material assistance to the Viet Minh was expanded. Given Mao’s domestic problems, I could only assume that his intervention in Korea was impelled by what he saw as a serious threat by the United States to the security of his regime. The timing of the commitment could not have been worse for the Communists. Mao had not yet consolidated his mastery of the mainland. There were still possibly one million Nationalist guerrillas, dubbed “bandits” by Mao, still operating in scattered areas. The economy had been totally disrupted by the Civil War, and millions of hungry tattered refugees were crowded into the towns and cities. General Chen Yi was making preparations in the South China ports for an assault on the Taiwan redoubt of Chiang Kai-shek.
According to the testimony of Nikita Khrushchev, documented in the book Khrushchev Remembers, and considerable other evidence from Chinese and Russian archives, the initiative for the invasion of South Korea originated with Kim Il-sung, the North Korean dictator. He held that the South Korean army would collapse before the onslaught of his Soviet-armed forces. The Syngman Rhee government would then be swept away, allowing him to unify the peninsula under his control. Stalin gave his approval for the thrust into South Korea and in turn urged Mao to support the invasion militarily. Mao was hesitant. Relations between Peking and the Kim government in Pyongyang were not close. The quick response of the United Nations in condemning the invasion and pledging aid to South Korea together with the Truman commitment of American armed forces had surprised both Mao and Stalin. The military involvement of the United States in what earlier had seemed to the Communist leaders to be not such a risky endeavor compelled a reassessment by Stalin and Mao on what support they might render Kim without becoming involved in a wider conflict.
Early in the Korean conflict, on a contingency basis Mao began deploying troops behind the Yalu River bordering China for possible intervention while he awaited military developments on the ground. From the time U.S. forces under the command of MacArthur landed in Korea, Mao never discounted the possibility that the Americans might continue up the peninsula to the Yalu River with the aim of destabilizing his regime. Immediately he was concerned about the vulnerability of the power plants close to the Yalu River, which were of vital importance to the Manchurian industrial heartland. Mao was not relieved of his anxieties by the fact that the Truman administration, acting under the mandate of the United Nations, seemed to be exercising care to avoid a clash with China. What Mao found most alarming was MacArthur’s liaisons with Chiang Kai-shek. On August 1, MacArthur had met Chiang on Taiwan. In a communiqué issued after the talks, Chiang spoke of military cooperation in defense of Taiwan, but he also added that victory over Mao on the mainland was assured. Chiang was then reassembling his forces in the hope that he might obtain American help for a return to the mainland. Seeking to cement his ties with MacArthur, the Generalissimo had offered three divisions for deployment in Korea, an offer that was declined on the advice of General Marshall and others who had little respect for the quality of Chiang’s troops. Chiang’s communiqué, which dismayed Truman and Secretary of State Acheson, who regarded it as provocative to the Chinese, had exaggerated the scope of the assurances of cooperation MacArthur had extended to the Nationalist leader. But Mao was not aware that this was the case or that Truman had directed the Seventh Fleet on June 28 not only to prevent any Communist attack from the mainland on Taiwan but also “any assault from Taiwan against the mainland.”
In debates within the Chinese Politburo, a majority of its members, including Zhou Enlai and General Lin Biao, the conqueror of Manchuria, at various times expressed opposition to a foray into Korea, given China’s internal problems and the danger of retaliation by the United States. Nevertheless, Mao persisted in reviewing the options. He cited the implications for China if the North Korean buffer state was overrun. Yet when he sent Zhou Enlai to Moscow, it was with instructions only to simply listen to Stalin’s proposal for Chinese intervention, I was told by a Chinese official intimately familiar with the talks. But then, as Mao observed events in Korea, a second set of instructions followed while Zhou was still in Moscow in which Mao bent to Stalin on condition that the Russian leader provide additional armaments and cover by the Soviet Air Force for Chinese troops if they should cross into Korea.
On September 30, as Chinese troops massed along the Yalu, Zhou Enlai issued the first of several warnings to the United States. In a public statement, Zhou said: “The [Chinese] people absolutely will not tolerate foreign aggression, nor will they supinely tolerate seeing their neighbors being savagely invaded by the imperialists.” Zhou then summoned the Indian ambassador, Sardar K. M. Panikkar, my interlocutor of Nanking days, to his Peking residence for a meeting on October 3, at which he formally communicated a warning that China would intervene if American troops crossed the thirty-eighth parallel. In his book In Two Chinas, published in 1955, Panikkar described the scene:
Though the occasion was the most serious I could imagine, a midnight interview on questions affecting the peace of the world . . . Zhou Enlai was as courteous and charming as ever and did not give the least impression of worry or nervousness or indeed of being in any particular hurry. He had the usual tea served and the first two minutes were spent in normal courtesies, apology for disturbing me at an unusual hour. Then he came to the point. He thanked Pandit Nehru for what he had been doing in the cause of peace, and said no country’s need for peace was greater than that of China, but there were occasions when peace could only be defended by determination to resi
st aggression. If the Americans crossed the 38th parallel China would be forced to intervene in Korea. Otherwise he was most anxious for a peaceful settlement, and generally accepted Pandit Nehru’s approach to the question. I asked him whether he had already news of the Americans having crossed the border. He reported in the affirmative but added he did not know where they had crossed. I asked him whether China intended to intervene, if only the South Koreans crossed the parallel. He was emphatic. The South Koreans did not matter but American intrusion into North Korea would encounter Chinese resistance.
On the Front Lines of the Cold War Page 23
