Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (39 page)

Even worse, the United States exploited the Korean War to do what should never have been done at all: to convert
NATO
from a political association into a real military alliance, with a joint command, a formal strategic doctrine and heaps of weapons. The Russians
still
weren’t coming, but by the end of the Korean War
NATO
had been thoroughly militarized—and it was a very deliberate business on the part of the United States. Within a week of the Korean invasion, U.S. forces were fully committed in Korea and armed with UN credentials to boot. Now, the Truman administration wanted America’s allies to send troops. Before the Canadian government committed itself (some members of cabinet were distinctly reluctant), Pearson made a secret visit to Washington to see Secretary of State Dean Acheson. It was an enlightening trip.

In short, the U.S. State Department was going to use Korea as the excuse and the goad for general rearmament, both in the United States and among its NATO allies. While he would be happy to have a detachment of trained Canadian soldiers in Korea for military reasons, Acheson concluded, he was even more interested in their political value.

The Korean War resembles the Boer War more than any of Canada’s other wars. It was fought far from Canada’s traditional areas of interest, and as Britain had used the South African war to set a precedent for the participation of its overseas dominions in imperial defence, so the United States was using the war in Asia to transform its purely political alliance into a militarily useful organization.

Following Pearson’s interview with Acheson, Ottawa agreed to send some destroyers to the Korean War and to airlift arms and supplies to the South Koreans. The Canadian government hoped that this would satisfy the Americans, for Pearson was already having to deny that Canada was merely following “the orders of a single member of the United Nations which has particular interests to safeguard in Korea.” Besides, despite Canada’s commitment to collective security, the
country did not have troops available to send to Korea (or anywhere else for that matter).

The request for Canadian ground troops in Korea formally came via UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie, but in fact it came from the United States, whose UN representative, Warren Austin, had told the secretary-general that American support for the United Nations “would be put in jeopardy” if he didn’t make the appeal. The Unified Command being set up in Korea was really just the American command with a few bangles and beads hung on it, but for those Canadians who recalled that a crusading anti-Communist alliance was not what we had been seeking to create in 1945 (or even 1949), there was a soothing source of confusion: the growing tendency to talk about NATO and the United Nations as though they were the same thing.

This grew out of the mental juggling act by which the founders of
NATO
had reconciled it with their earlier commitment to collective security, but by 1950 it had gone a step further. When Prime Minister St. Laurent announced on August 4 that Canada would raise a “special force” of troops for UN service in Korea, he told the public that they would also be available for “carrying out Canada’s obligations … under the North Atlantic Pact.” The distinction between
NATO
and the United Nations had vanished utterly.

This was precisely the result Dean Acheson had intended: his primary purpose in getting the NATO allies to send troops to Korea was to make them rearm in Europe, and it worked wonderfully well. In Ottawa, Lieutenant-General Guy Simonds, the Chief of the General Staff, was more than half convinced by the interpretation, popular in U.S. military circles, that the attack in Korea was a feint by a monolithic “world Communist conspiracy” to draw Western troops off into Asia before the Russians launched the main onslaught in Europe. And so Canada agreed to send troops not just to Korea but also to Europe, and commenced a wholesale rearmament programme. Nor, it turned out, was there any difficulty in raising the extra troops that were needed, even though the urgency of getting a brigade to Korea meant that the government was looking for trained men.

By August 26, 1950 eight thousand experienced men, regular soldiers or veterans of the Second World War, had volunteered. The Korean War never appealed strongly to Canadian patriotism or idealism, but it did not require more manpower than was available in that limited reservoir of “natural soldiers” which exists in every country. In these circumstances it is not surprising that Quebec provided its full 30 percent
share of the force. But for a time, it looked as if they would all get there too late for the war.

When Canada first agreed to send forces to Korea, the Americans and their South Korean protégés were barely clinging to the bottom of the peninsula around Pusan, and nine-tenths of South Korea had been occupied. But on September 15, 1950 General MacArthur opened his counter-offensive with an amphibious assault on Inchon, the port for Seoul. By September 27 Seoul itself had been recaptured and most of the North Korean army destroyed. South Korea was liberated, and the pre-war situation could have been re-established without much further bloodshed.

With the North Korean army in ruins, the United States could not resist a little expansionism of its own. As U.S. ambassador Austin put it at the United Nations: “A living social, political and spiritual monument
to the achievement of the first enforcement of the United Nations peacekeeping function must be erected.” Freely translated, that meant that the United States got the UN General Assembly to agree, on October 7, to the conquest of North Korea and the unification of the country under the American-backed regime in the South.

The Canadian government, having failed to persuade the Americans to stop at the 38th Parallel, tried to get their consent to what Pearson ironically called “the inevitable Canadian compromise.” Meeting with the American ambassador to the United Nations in New York the night before the crucial General Assembly meeting, he suggested that the United Nations should give the North Koreans a period of grace, three or four days, in which to agree to a ceasefire and armistice negotiations before the UN forces crossed the old border. If it did prove necessary to cross the 38th Parallel, then the UN troops should at least go no farther north than the narrow “neck” of the peninsula between the 39th and 40th parallels, far enough away from the Chinese border that Peking would not feel threatened. Senator Austin agreed to put forward these proposals himself the following morning—or so Pearson was led to believe.

The UN forces plunged north across the 38th Parallel the following day on a “Home-by-Christmas” offensive, while General MacArthur sent his air forces ranging all the way north to the Chinese border along the Yalu River. His ground forces were still almost entirely American, but a few of his pilots were Canadian airmen attached to American squadrons. Omer Lévesque, shot down over France in 1941 with four
kills to his credit, became an ace while serving as an exchange officer with the U.S. Air Force in Korea.

As American troops approached the Yalu River, the nervous Chinese government, only one year in power after a long civil war against an American-backed opponent, sent a steady stream of warnings through the Indian ambassador in Peking, K.M. Panikkar, that it would intervene in the war if the Americans came too close to the frontier. American diplomats at the United Nations flippantly remarked, “Pannikar is panicking.” Ottawa, however, had serious doubts about the advisability of trying to establish a U.S.-supported government by military force on the borders of Manchuria, China’s major industrial area.

The American dream of reuniting Korea by force lasted less than two months. At the end of October 1950, as American and South Korean forces closed up to the Chinese frontier, the first Chinese units were reported across the Yalu—and in late November the roof fell in. Two hundred thousand Chinese “volunteers” struck the UN front, and the American forces, desperately trying to avoid being cut off, began a rapid retreat back down the peninsula: the “Big Bug-out,” as the G.I.s called it.