On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  Panikkar immediately relayed Zhou Enlai’s warning to New Dehli, where it was forwarded to the State Department. The decision as whether to heed Zhou Enlai’s warning was put to Truman. At the time MacArthur was pressing his advance toward the parallel and was calling upon Kim Il-sung to capitulate. MacArthur was holding out the prospect of a united non-Communist Korea. The White House was told by both the CIA and British intelligence that Panikkar was biased in favor of the Chinese and that they evaluated his advice as unreliable. Earlier, when asked to address the question of the “threat of full Chinese Intervention in Korea,” the CIA stated in a memo dated October 12, which was declassified and published in 2006: “The Chinese Communist ground forces, currently lacking requisite air and naval support, are capable of intervening effectively, but not necessarily decisively, in the Korean conflict . . . While full-scale Chinese Communist intervention in Korea must be regarded as a continuing possibility, a consideration of all known factors leads to the conclusion that barring a Soviet decision for global war, such action is not probable in 1950. During this period, intervention will probably be confined to continued covert assistance to the North Koreans.”

  Given these intelligence assessments, Truman dismissed the message from Zhou Enlai as a bluff, asserting that Panikkar had “played the game of the Chinese Communists fairly regularly” and that the Chinese warning was “probably a bald attempt to blackmail the United Nations by threats of intervention in Korea.”

  The Truman reaction to the Zhou Enlai warning would lead to one of the greatest military disasters in American history.

  In the first weeks of the invasion, North Korean forces with a vanguard of Russian T-34 tanks had surged down the peninsula overrunning the ill-prepared South Korean army and the American Task Force Smith, made of up of elements of the U.S. Army’s Twenty-fourth Division, hastily transferred from occupation duty in Japan. By August, the U.S. Eighth Army and South Korean forces had been forced to fall back into a perimeter around the city of Pusan in the southeastern corner of the peninsula. The allied perimeter defenses withstood heavy North Korean attacks while large-scale reinforcements of American, South Korean, and allied United Nations forces were being assembled. Massive American air strikes began to rupture the overly extended North Korean supply lines. In early September, MacArthur’s forces broke out of the Pusan perimeter. MacArthur then undertook a brilliant, albeit risky, operation, dubbed “Chromite,” which altered the course of the war.

  MacArthur activated the X Corps under General Edward Almond, his former chief of Staff, comprising 70,000 troops of the First Marine Division and the Army’s Seventh Infantry Division, augmented by 8,600 South Korean troops. The X Corps then executed an amphibious operation, landing on September 15 at the port of Inchon on the coast of the Yellow Sea, 150 miles northwest of Pusan, and deployed behind the North Korean lines. They encountered only light resistance from the surprised North Koreans. Kim Il-sung had given scant attention to warnings by Mao and the Chinese military leadership that the Allies might attempt such a landing at Inchon. The X Corps struck inland, recaptured Seoul, and moved to cut off the main body of the retreating shattered North Korean army.

  In what was characterized as hot pursuit, MacArthur sent the South Korean Second Division across the thirty-eighth parallel into North Korea on September 30. Zhou Enlai had told Panikkar that China would not intervene if only the South Koreans crossed the parallel. MacArthur was then in receipt of an “eyes alone” message from General George Marshall, the new secretary of defense, stating: “We want you to feel unhampered tactically and strategically to proceed north of the 38th parallel.” It was with this mandate, defying the Zhou Enlai warning about a crossing by American troops, that MacArthur took the fatal decision of ordering the First Cavalry Division of the U.S. Eighth Army across the parallel on October 7. The division in pursuit of the retreating North Korean army occupied Pyongyang, Kim Il-sung’s capital, on October 20. While the Eighth Army advanced, the X Corps was trucked south to the port of Pusan, where its component First Marine Division and the army’s Seventh Division, commanded by General David G. Barr, the former head of the Joint U.S. Military Advisory Group (JUSMAG) in Nanking, boarded transports with the mission of landing in a flanking operation at Wonsan, a North Korean port on the coast of the Sea of Japan. On October 24, just before the X Corps made its unopposed landing at Wonsan, MacArthur ordered the Eighth Army in the west and the X Corps in the east, making up two spearheads, to drive forward with all speed to the Yalu River to secure control of all North Korea. As to consideration of the possibility of Chinese intervention, ten days earlier, in a meeting with President Truman on Wake Island to reassess strategy, MacArthur assured the president, according to the transcript of their conversations, that of Mao’s troops “only 50,000 or 60,000 could be gotten across the Yalu River. They have no air force. Now that we have bases for our air force in Korea, if the Chinese tried to get down to Pyongyang, there would be the greatest slaughter.”

  As MacArthur’s forces thrust north, Chinese troops began infiltrating into North Korea. They were dubbed “volunteers” by Mao to maintain the fiction that China was not formally at war with the United States, which Lin Bao had warned in Politburo meetings might bring nuclear reprisal. The so-called volunteers actually included battle-hardened veterans of the Fourth Field Army as well as North Korean units which together had served under Lin Biao in his defeat of Chiang Kai-shek’s forces in Manchuria. Suddenly, on November 1, at 10:30 P.M. as the Eighth Army made its way north toward the Yalu, the Chinese struck in overwhelming force, overrunning the Eighth Cavalry Regiment of the First Cavalry Division, which was occupying forward positions near the town of Unsan. As described in the annals of the U.S. Army Center of Military History, the Chinese came out of the hills blowing bugles and firing at the surprised Americans. Withdrawing before these “human wave” assaults, the unnerved men of the Eighth Cavalry abandoned their artillery and took to the hills in small groups. The elite regiment lost more than eight hundred men, almost one-third of its total strength. The Eighth Army, as other of its units came under attack, retreated to defensive positions along the Chongchon River. Then, mysteriously on November 6, the Chinese disappeared from the Eighth Army front and also on the east where a marine battalion of the X Corps, leading the spearhead moving north toward the Yalu, had earlier come under attack. There is no certainty as to whether the Chinese withdrew simply to give MacArthur the opportunity to break off his advance toward the Yalu, as Huang Hua explained to me in later years, or whether the withdrawal was actually a stratagem to lure the Americans into a massive trap.

  Despite these shocking setbacks, MacArthur and Willoughby continued to insist to Washington that the Chinese would not press their intervention in any great force. The disappearance from the fronts of the Chinese troops on November 6 was cited in support of their contention. According to the U.S. Army Center of Military History, Willoughby estimated that the number of Chinese troops in the theater of operation was 35,500, while in reality more than 300,000 organized in thirty divisions had already moved into Korea. This was a juncture in the war when expert knowledge of Chinese strategy and tactics was desperately needed if MacArthur was to cope with the threat. The single senior American military officer most qualified to provide that advice was General Barr. I had known Barr extremely well when he headed JUSMAG in Nanking, both from his pre-1949 briefings and socially. His daughter, Ginny Barr, was Audrey’s close friend and a schoolmate at Nanking University. In the year Barr spent in China as commander of JUSMAG before its withdrawal at the end of 1948, the general had gained an intimate knowledge of the operations of both the Communist and Nationalist armies, expertise which was evidenced in his comprehensive reports to the Department of Defense. But as far as I am aware, Barr was not consulted by Willoughby or MacArthur in their strategic planning or enlisted in advising their subordinate commanders on Chinese tactics and strategy. He was in command of the Seventh Division when the Chinese intervened, l
eading his troops up from the port of Wonsan toward the Yalu River.

  MacArthur was relying on air power to shield his troops when he ordered the twin spearheads of the Eighth Army and the X Corps to resume their push to the Yalu. Misled by Willoughby’s intelligence assessments, MacArthur had failed to grasp that he was exposing his forces to the classic type of entrapment which had brought victory to the People’s Liberation Army in engagements during the Chinese Civil War. As MacArthur’s troops moved north, Chinese armies were pouring across the Yalu bridges, employing well-practiced stealth tactics, marching only by night along mountain trails under perfect discipline to avoid detection, and taking up positions for a massive deadly assault.

  As the Chinese were readying their assault, the X Corps’ Fifth and Seventh Marine regiments of the First Division reached the hills overlooking the Chosin Reservoir near the Yalu and were joined in the area by the Thirty-first Regimental Combat Team, made up of units of the Seventh Division. One of the team’s units slogging farther north entered Hyesanjin on the Yalu River on November 20. Hyesanjin, which in Korean means “ghost city of broken bridges,” was the farthest point north reached by MacArthur’s forces. In the army’s official history of the Seventh Division, Colonel Herbert B. Powell, a regimental commander, is quoted as saying: “We swept through the city and took a good look around. Then we dropped back to a good hill position to wait for something to happen.” They didn’t have long to wait.

  Suddenly, during two days of November 25 to 27, on a 300-mile front, with the bugles sounding once again, an estimated 300,000 Chinese troops swarmed down from the steep border mountain ranges which MacArthur had once described as too precipitous to shelter troops. They descended on surprised American and South Korean troops outnumbering them as much as ten to one. A wedge was driven between the Eighth Army and the X Corps. The Marines and the Thirty-first Regimental Combat Team of the X Corps were surrounded by three Chinese divisions. The Chinese mounted ferocious attacks at night and retreated during the day to escape the American air support, which alone prevented the surrounded units from being totally overrun. Ordered by MacArthur on December 5 to withdraw, the 25,000 U.S. Marines, and 100 British Royal Marines of the X Corps broke out of encirclement and fought southward toward the port at Hungnam, on the coast of the Yellow Sea, where ships of the Seventh Fleet were assembling to pick them up. The successful breakout was made possible by the holding operation east of Chosin of the Thirty-first Regimental Combat Team, but in the five-day battle the army unit was virtually destroyed as an integrated fighting force. In twelve days of running battles at times through blinding snowstorms over some fifty torturous miles to their embarkation point, the marine regiments managed to remain fairly intact, inflicting heavy casualties on the Chinese divisions, which sought to block their withdrawal. About 11,000 marines survived the retreat from Chosin, having suffered 561 dead, 162 missing, and 2,894 wounded. The Thirty-first Regimental Combat Team suffered the most devastating losses as they fought south to the port. A total of only about 1,050 of its 2,500 troops survived. Inadequately clothed for the Arctic-like temperatures, the army troops and marines suffered frostbite and other disabilities. Under the cover of naval gunfire, 105,000 troops of the X Corps were moved by landing craft out of the Hungnam port to waiting ships, the last of them embarking on Christmas Eve 1950. They were re-deployed to South Korea to join the Eighth Army, which was in full retreat in the west.

  General Barr was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, cited for inspiring his men by personally braving enemy fire during the drive north to the Yalu. But the general was so distraught by the losses suffered by the Thirty-first Regimental Combat Team of his Seventh Division in the retreat from Chosin that he was replaced after New Year’s Day by Major General Claude B. Ferenbaugh as commander of the Seventh Division.

  On New Year’s Eve, attacking once again through the snow with temperatures below zero, the Chinese shattered what remained of the United Nations front. A precipitous general retreat ensued of the Eighth Army and South Korean units in the face of an onslaught by swelling numbers of Chinese troops. Pursuing the fleeing Americans, the Communists captured Seoul in January.

  While MacArthur’s forces were being hacked severely in their retreat, the cost to the Chinese Communists in casualties was even greater. Out of apparent apprehension of being drawn directly into war with the United States, Stalin reneged on his agreement with Zhou Enlai to provide immediate and effective air cover. The Chinese troops were exposed to devastating attacks by the largely unopposed American Air Force. A few Russian-made MIG jets ventured into North Korea in early November but did not appear in some force over the battlefields until the first part of 1951. Some were piloted by Chinese trained by the Russians. Others were flown by Russians who kept radio silence to conceal their nationality. The MIGs proved to be less than effective in combat against the U.S. Air Force.

  On December 3, MacArthur reported to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the Chinese had committed what he described as twenty-six splendidly equipped and trained divisions against him with 200,000 troops in reserve. He was not sure that his forces could hold a line in South Korea. He complained that the South Korean forces had proven largely useless. Willoughby’s intelligence had been faulty throughout in assessing Chinese capabilities, and now among his other errors he had made the mistake of identifying the Communist field commander as Lin Biao. The commander was, in fact, Peng Dehuai, one of the most distinguished generals of the Long March, who had served as deputy commander in chief to Zhu De in the war against Japan and had led the First Field Army in sweeping up northwestern China during the Civil War. Lin Biao, who had questioned the wisdom of intervention in Korea, was offered the command but declined pleading ill health.

  On December 30, when consideration was being given to possible withdrawal to Japan of the shattered American army, MacArthur was asked by the Pentagon to lay out his contingency planning. MacArthur startled the White House with his reply. According to his memoir Reminiscences, he asked for authorization to: “(1) blockade . . . the coast of China; (2) destroy through naval gunfire and air bombardment China’s industrial capacity to wage war; (3) secure appropriate reinforcements from the Nationalist garrison on Taiwan to strengthen our position in Korea if we decide to continue the fight for that peninsula; and (4) release existing restrictions upon the Taiwan garrison for diversionary action, possibly leading to counter-invasion against vulnerable areas of the China mainland.”

  He added that these measures would assure victory in Korea and “save Asia from the engulfment otherwise facing it.” The alternative to what he was proposing was defeat and acceptance of a “tactical plan of successively contracting defense lines south to the Pusan beachhead” as the only possible way in which “the evacuation could be accomplished.”

  MacArthur’s proposals were rejected by the White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff as impractical in strategic terms and a provocation which could lead to world conflict. When MacArthur pressed for authority to bomb targets in China, Truman refused permission. When the general made the disagreement public, the president fired him as supreme commander, and he was recalled to Washington.

  General Barr reappeared in June 1951 to testify at the Senate’s investigation of the White House’s Asian policies and President Truman’s recall of MacArthur. The general was stationed at the time at the Armored Center, the army’s training school for tank commanders. Barr said he had favored MacArthur’s proposal for “hot pursuit”—chasing of enemy planes into Manchuria—but endorsed the rejection by the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the general’s more aggressive polices. He said that MacArthur’s policies would have risked world war.

  With MacArthur’s recall, General Mathew B. Ridgway succeeded to command of the Eighth Army, which had been merged with the remnants of the X Corps. General Walton Walker, commander of the Eighth Army, had died in a jeep accident on an icy road. After months of inconclusive combat, the front stabilized around the thirty-eighth paralle
l, and Ridgeway opened truce negotiations with the Chinese and North Koreans on July 10, 1951. Negotiations at Panmunjom, which involved Huang Hua as the chief Chinese delegate, broke down four times. The Communists became more flexible in the negotiations after President Eisenhower warned that the United States might not be adverse to the use of nuclear weapons in the conflict. An armistice was concluded on July 23, 1953, with the thirty-eighth parallel as the line of demarcation between the North and South Korean forces pending negotiations at the Geneva Conference of a final peace settlement.

  It had been a useless, enormously costly war with no gain on any side. In its origins, responsibility obviously rested in the first instance on Kim Il-sung and Stalin. In assessing the American role, MacArthur had made gross miscalculations, compounded by Willoughby’s intelligence failures in assessing Chinese intentions and strategy. Truman shared in responsibility for having induced the entry of China into the Korean War. While he balked at any crossing of the Yalu River line, he gave MacArthur license to pursue the North Korean army beyond the thirty-eighth parallel. His dismissal of Zhou Enlai’s warning transmitted through Panikkar as bluff, based in part on the highly questionable intelligence denigrations of the Indian ambassador’s reliability as a channel of communication, was a fatal error. Based upon my own contacts with Panikkar in Nanking as well as assessments by Western diplomats who knew him well, such as Chester Ronning, there was no reason to question Panikkar’s competence and reliability as a professional diplomat.

  In retrospect, the analysis of the Chinese intervention in the Korean War, written by Richard W. Stewart for the U.S. Army Center of Military History, stated, “The initial warning attacks and diplomatic hints by the Chinese were ignored by the overconfident Far Eastern Command under General MacArthur. MacArthur’s failure to comprehend the reality of the situation led the entire United Nations Army to near disaster at the Chongchon River and the Chosin Reservoir. Only the grit and determination of the individual American soldiers and Marines as they fought the major enemies of cold, fear, and isolation held the UN line together during the retreats from North Korea.”