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The Cold War Turns Hot (abridged)
The news came, finally, on July 27th, 1953. After three years of staggeringly bloody warfare and two years of halting negotiations, a U.S.-led United Nations team and Communist representatives from North Korea and China signed a truce in Panmunjom, North Korea. by John Biewen A Universal Studios newsreel put it this way: "The long war, undertaken to stop Red aggression, is over. The enemy holds less territory than before his troops marched, but the cost has been bitter for both sides." The war had ended in stalemate, with Korea still divided. Two million or more Koreans and Chinese were dead - along with almost 37,000 Americans. The Americans who fought in Korea returned home not to parades but, mostly, silence. In this special report, we explore a war that's often overlooked but that helped to define global politics, and American life, for the second half of the 20th century. In the late 1940's, with World War II freshly behind them, Americans hoped peace and prosperity had finally come to stay. Millions bought new homes in the suburbs and had babies; there was talk of a new gadget called a television. In September 1949, President Harry Truman announced that the Soviet Union had detonated an atomic bomb the previous month. Just weeks later, Communist forces led by Mao Tse-tung took power in China. The Red Scare was on, in Senator Joseph McCarthy's speeches and in radio debates about whether to officially ban the U.S. Communist Party. American leaders said they'd learned from their experience with the Nazis that the U.S. needed to confront the world's bullies sooner rather than later. At the same time, though, the United States had dramatically downsized its military. Especially in Asia. Almost nobody guessed that the first big test of the Cold War would come in Korea, the Utah-sized peninsula that juts out from Asia's east end. It had been sliced in half at the end of World War II, when the Soviet Union occupied the North and the Americans the South. The two occupation zones had hardened into separate countries, one a communist dictatorship tied to the Soviet Union, the other a corrupt, authoritarian society linked to the United States. In 1948 and '49, the Soviets and the Americans had pulled most of their troops off the peninsula. Neither South Korea nor its American protector was ready for what happened on June 25th, 1950. In the summer of 1950, Alexander Haig was a 25-year-old aide in General Douglas MacArthur's occupation headquarters in Tokyo. He was on duty that Sunday morning, June 25th, when a phone call came in from across the Sea of Japan, in Seoul. It was John Muccio, the U.S. Ambassador to South Korea. "And he told me that the North Koreans had attacked, an attack that was launched at six that morning, down several routes, with massive forces," Haig recalls. Both North and South Korea had been itching for a fight, and there'd been dozens of skirmishes and false alarms in recent months. Not this time, says Haig. "[Muccio] assured me that it was the real thing, and I immediately called my immediate commander, General Almond. Almond then immediately called MacArthur." Over the next few days, President Truman held intensive discussions with his advisors in Washington, and with General MacArthur in Tokyo via Teletype conference. Al Haig recalls sitting in on several of the "telecons" in the Tokyo headquarters. "I think both MacArthur and the President concluded that this was an action that could not be tolerated," Haig says, "because it was clearly instigated by the Soviet Union." In fact, documents released by Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union suggest the attack was instigated by North Korean leader Kim Il Sung, not Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. But the documents also show that the North Koreans asked for, and got, Stalin's permission. The war between the Koreas was two things at once, most historians now agree: a civil war, and an opportunistic foray by the communist bloc. U.S. leaders had wavered, publicly and privately, on whether they would defend South Korea militarily. Some historians suspect the war might have been prevented entirely if the Americans had made clear that they would respond to a North Korean assault. In any case, now that the attack had come, Truman saw no alternative. "And he responded in a way that shaped the rest of the 20th century," says Flint. "That's how important I think the decision was." Meeting in emergency session - and with the Soviets absent, [they were boycotting over the U.N.'s refusal to recognize Communist China] - the U.N. Security Council voted to defend South Korea. It put the United States in charge, and named MacArthur commander of the allied force. This would be the U.N.'s first war. Fifty-three countries registered their support, and twenty-two of them offered troops and other help. But the U.S. would carry the main military load - something it wasn't prepared to do. Jack Goodwin of Waco, Texas was a 19-year-old private with the 21st Infantry, stationed on the Japanese island of Kyushu. "I was almost ready to come home when the war started," Goodwin recalls. "They told us we were going to Korea. We said, 'Where's that?'" Goodwin was among 406 infantry soldiers in Task Force Smith - the first Americans to reach Korea, on July 2nd, 1950. The men flew into South Korea, then boarded trains, then trucks, then finally walked, Goodwin says, to Osan, south of Seoul. "And that's where we dug in." On their way north, the Americans had passed fleeing South Korean soldiers and refugees. Task Force Smith's job was to take a position on a hill and slow the North Korean blitz until reinforcements could follow. War correspondent Marguerite Higgins of the New York Herald Tribune was the only woman to cover the Korean War up close. In a speech later that year she recalled walking on the morning of July 4th into "the muddy, flea-infested hut that held the battalion command post. General Barth, then assistant commander, strode into our hut with the news, 'Red tanks are heading this way.'" Higgins recalled that the general added confidently, "'Colonel Smith's battalion on up ahead is going to take them on. I'm confident that he can hold.'" But the men of Task Force Smith carried obsolete World War II weapons. And they were outnumbered ten to one. The North Koreans "come through with tanks," says then-GI Goodwin - new, Soviet-built tanks - "and that got us because we didn't have nothing to take out a tank. They just went right around us and started shooting us from the back. I got off the hill and got captured the next morning." Goodwin would spend more than three years in North Korean and Chinese prisoner-of-war camps. When the dead and missing were counted and a few survivors had drifted in, the commander of Task Force Smith found he'd lost 153 of his 406 infantrymen. That's how things went in those first weeks, as the U.N. threw in troops as it could muster them and had them repeatedly overrun. In the first month of the Korean War, more than 2,800 Americans were killed. For President Truman, the lesson of these humiliations was that America needed military might to match its role in the world. Speaking with reporters on his way to meet MacArthur on Wake Island a few months into the war, Truman said: "In one generation we've come from an isolated republic, to the position of the leadership of the world. And as the most powerful nation in the world, we have to assume world responsibilities." Congress agreed. U.S. military spending tripled during the three years of the Korean War and never again sank to pre-Korean War levels. As I talk with you," President Truman said in a radio address to the nation, "thousands of families in this land of ours have a son, or a brother, or a husband fighting in Korea." It was the first of September 1950, two months after the North Korean army stormed across the border at the 38th Parallel into South Korea. United Nations forces, thousands already dead and wounded, had been beaten back into the southeast corner of the Korean peninsula. There, 100,000 troops under the U.S. 8th Army fought to avoid being pushed into the sea, while more forces steamed across the Pacific. Truman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had just approved a plan conceived by General Douglas MacArthur: a bold amphibious landing far behind enemy lines on the west coast of South Korea at the port of Inchon. The Joint Chiefs had reluctantly recommended approval of the plan after a meeting with MacArthur in Tokyo. The 1st Marine Division, 17,000 strong, went ashore at Inchon on September 15th. "Luckily the opposition at Inchon was not severe. The North Koreans only had about two thousand second-rate troops there," recalls Edwin Howard Simmons, a retired Marine brigadier general who was then a company commander with the 1st Marines. The landing surprised the North Korean Army, which was then massed a hundred miles south, pressing down on Allied forces around Pusan. "It literally turned the battlefield around and put us at the enemy's flank and in his rear," says Simmons. "The 8th Army came out of the Pusan Perimeter, attacked to the north, and essentially, by that time, the North Korean army was broken." Within two weeks, the U.N. had taken back Seoul and restored the South Korean government in its capital. The North Koreans had retreated across the 38th Parallel into their own territory. This is the decisive moment in the Korean War," says historian Roy Flint. "The Americans had a choice. And I say the Americans because they're calling the shots militarily for the United Nations. Should we cross the 38th Parallel?" In other words, U.N. forces could declare victory and go home, having chased the aggressors out of South Korea. Or they could push northward, finish off the North Korean army, and try to reunite the peninsula. Urged on by MacArthur and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Truman adopted the new, more ambitious war aim. Some of Truman's advisers feared disaster - with good reason. "If you look at the map," says Flint, "they're going to invade across the 38th Parallel into an expanding, fan-shaped peninsula, which is going to stretch the Korean and American forces thinly at best while that force is advancing toward the Chinese border!" "We shouldn't have gone above the 38th Parallel. That's where we should have stopped," says Frank Miller, now of Durham, North Carolina. Miller was an artilleryman in the 1st Marine Division. His unit would confront a new enemy on the North Korean side of the line. "There was reports that the Chinese were seen, but MacArthur and his crew in Japan didn't pay any attention to it." That is, hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers were crossing into North Korea under the cover of night to wait for the Americans. Frank Miller would be wounded fighting them. In fact, the Chinese had begun crossing the Yalu River, in force, in October. By Thanksgiving, historians now estimate, Chinese troops in North Korea numbered several hundred thousand. Just as the United States would not tolerate a Communist invasion into South Korea, China's Mao Tse-Tung had decided, with urging from Stalin in the Soviet Union, that he couldn't accept American troops on his border. Just after Thanksgiving, 1950, allied divisions streamed northward in two columns, east and west - separated by a spine of high mountains that splits North Korea. The Chinese army stayed hidden and let U.N. troops pass, then enveloped them and streamed out of the hills. The Chinese Army cut down Americans and their allies by the thousands. Mao's forces lost even more men. "It was the most depressing, extravagant use of human resources I've ever seen," says Haig, who would travel to some of the battle scenes with his boss, General Ned Almond. "The Chinese would attack against a steel wall of heavy fire over and over, and the [Chinese] bodies would be stacked up like cord wood." As ill clothed as the Americans were for the North Korean cold, the Chinese may have been worse off. Most had no gloves and their shoes were made of cloth with rubber, sneaker-like soles. Many simply froze to death. But the sheer numbers of Chinese troops won the day. U.N. forces beat a long retreat, some units withdrawing more than 200 miles, back below the 38th Parallel. MacArthur's drive for the Yalu River had cost the allies 13,000 dead, wounded, captured and missing. Thousands more suffered severe frostbite. The scale of America's defeat by the Chinese Army sank in back home. "Certainly [there's] nothing in the 20th century to compare with it," says historian Flint. "We were defeated! The people were shocked, the Congress was shocked, and the President and his staff were shocked." With the Chinese entry into the war, Harry Truman faced perhaps his gravest decision yet. "The future of civilization depends on what we do - on what we do now, and in the months ahead," Truman said in a speech to the nation on December 15th, 1950. The long-running tension between the president and his aggressive commander, MacArthur, now bloomed into a confrontation. MacArthur's Inchon landing in September had been a brilliant success, his late-November march for the Yalu a catastrophe. Now MacArthur wanted to up the ante again. He asked to unleash the United States' allies in Taiwan (then known as Formosa), to bomb Chinese bases in Manchuria, and he demanded more U.S. troops to attack the Chinese. The proud general wanted to undo his humiliating defeat, says Flint. "His position in history was at stake here." So was Truman's. The president and his advisers wanted no part of a wider war with China - a war that, they feared, might well be joined by the Soviet Union with its superior conventional forces and its new atomic capability. The Truman administration began signaling that it would try to fight its way back to a "position of strength" - regaining lost ground south of the 38th Parallel - and then seek a negotiated end to the war. In late March, while Secretary of State Dean Acheson floated hints of a willingness to talk with the Chinese, MacArthur issued a statement taunting the Chinese as an overrated military force and demanding that the commander of the Chinese Army meet with him personally or risk a wider war. The statement violated an explicit administration ban on unauthorized foreign policy pronouncements. "I have thought long and hard about this question of extending the war in Asia," Truman said in an address to the nation on April 11th, 1951, explaining his decision to use restraint in Korea - and to fire the legendary MacArthur. "I believe that we must try to limit the war to Korea for these vital reasons," Truman went on: "to make sure that the precious lives of our fighting men are not wasted; to see that the security of our country and the free world is not needlessly jeopardized; and to prevent a third world war. A number of events have made it evident that General MacArthur did not agree with that policy." "I was happy," recalls Army veteran Harry Cohen, now of Boynton Beach, Florida. He was in the hospital recovering from a combat wound when he heard Truman had relieved MacArthur. Cohen had never agreed with the decision to pursue the North Koreans north of the 38th Parallel. "Of course the guy in the next bed said, 'Hey, we should go all the way and go through Moscow!' I says, 'You're crazy. They got a lot more Chinese than we have Americans.'" Cohen estimates that U.S. soldiers, "four to one," supported the firing of MacArthur. U.S. allies, led by Britain, praised Truman's firing of a general they considered a loose canon. But in the United States, the removal of the venerable MacArthur created a firestorm. The general returned from Japan to huge parades in San Francisco, Washington and New York. In his historic "old soldiers never die" speech to a joint session of Congress, the general attacked Truman's decision to rein him in in Korea. "Once war is forced upon us," MacArthur intoned, "there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end. War's very object is victory, not prolonged indecision." But public enthusiasm for the hawkish MacArthur wouldn't last. His career was over. Less than a year into the Korean War, Harry Truman had made a series of decisions that would frame U.S. foreign policy for the next forty years. America would try to avoid confronting the big Communist powers head-on, but it would keep its military strong and fight proxy wars to head off Communist expansion. "I argue that the Korean War was fundamental in shaping the Cold War as we know it," says historian William Stueck of the University of Georgia. In Korea, meanwhile, U.N. forces rallied in the spring of 1951 under their new commander, General Matthew Ridgeway. They pushed the Chinese back to slightly north of the 38th Parallel, the war's original starting line. Then both sides dug in and started to look for a way out. Peace talks began on July 10th, 1951, but quickly bogged down in mistrust and recriminations. The talks would continue, haltingly, for more than two years. So would bloody battles for small pieces of ground with nicknames like Heartbreak Ridge and Pork Chop Hill. The stalemate broke in 1953 after both superpowers got new leadership. In Moscow, Stalin died and was replaced by the more moderate Georgi Malenkov. President Dwight Eisenhower took office and kept a campaign promise to stop the fighting. An armistice - though not a peace treaty - was signed on July 27th, 1953. | |
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