The Cold War (24 page)

On the evening of May 6, members of a work detail from the hard-core Compound 76 complained to Raven that they had been beaten by the guards, and they asked to see Dodd. As an inducement, they agreed to be fingerprinted, thus assisting him in his program of positively identifying all prisoners. Just after
two P
.
M. on May 7, Dodd arrived and started talking, as was his custom, at the unlocked sally port of the compound. The subject moved from food to politics to the truce negotiations, but however amicable the discussion may have seemed, the two officers refused the prisoners' invitation to enter the compound. A work detail carrying tents for salvage approached the gate, which was opened for them. The prisoners drew closer to Dodd and Raven to continue the discussion—and then jumped them. As the prisoners pulled at him, Raven held fast to a post. But before any guards could reach Dodd, he was dragged into the compound and placed in a specially prepared tent divided into a tworoom suite. The prisoners quickly raised a banner, also prepared in advance: WE
CAPTURE
DODD
.
AS
LONG
AS
OUR
DEMAND
WILL
BE
SOLVED
,
HIS
SAFETY
IS
SECURED
.
IF
THERE
HAPPEN
BRUTAL
ACT
SUCH
AS
SHOOTING
,
HIS
LIFE
IS
IN
DANGER. Within hours, a field-telephone line from camp headquarters was connected to Dodd's quarters in the prison compound, and tortuous negotiations for his release commenced.

No more vulnerable moment could have been chosen, and it was impossible that the Communist planners did not know that Dodd's kidnap coincided with the transfer of command from Ridgway to Clark. The new commander arrived in Tokyo almost at the moment Dodd was being seized on Koje-do, thus making for confusion through equivocal responsibility. The memoirs of the two generals make it easy to imagine the almost farcical relationship between them as they juggled this international incident in the hope that the onus for it might land on the other.

At first, Ridgway writes, he “was determined to work out a solution to this prickly matter myself, along with Van Fleet, and not toss it, on such short notice, onto General Clark's dinner plate.” Nevertheless, Ridgway took himself on a final inspection tour of Korea on May 8, four days before he was to hand over command to Clark, and he asked Clark to fly with him to Korea. Only when they were aloft did he let Clark in on what was happening. According to Clark's memoirs, Ridgway, addressing him by his middle name as his intimates did, confided, “Wayne, we've got a little situation over in Korea where it's reported some prisoners have taken in one of the camp commanders, General Dodd, and are holding him as a hostage. We'll have to get into that situation when we arrive at Eighth Army Headquarters [in Seoul] and find out what the score is.”

Clark likened himself to someone who was “walking into something that felt remarkably like a swinging door.” But what really astounded him was that the
prisoner uprising was “something for which I had no preparation whatever. Although I had been briefed in Washington on every conceivable subject, this was the first time I had ever heard of Koje or the critical prisoner of war problems that existed behind our lines.”

He was to hear more, much more. At Seoul, Ridgway directed Van Fleet in writing to establish order, using tanks if necessary to “shoot and to shoot with maximum effect.” Ridgway was ready to sacrifice Dodd, who, he argued, had accepted mortal risks when he took up the profession of arms. “In wartime,” he wrote later, “a general's life is no more precious than the life of a common soldier. If, in order to save an officer's life, we abandoned the cause for which enlisted men had died, we would be guilty of betraying the men whose lives had been placed in our care.” Brave words after the fact, especially when Ridgway, in later reports to Truman and testimony to Congress, could not bring himself to take any blame as supreme commander. “In my view,” he stated, “the whole situation had been ineptly handled by the responsible officers in Korea.”

When Van Fleet arrived at Koje-do, he delayed attacking the compound until heavy armor arrived from the mainland. Meanwhile, negotiations to save Dodd were under way through Brigadier General Charles F. Colson, a staff officer suddenly vaulted into command of the Koje camp. It was not the mere seizure of Dodd that was at issue, but what the Communists could make of it. Under the direction of Pak, the political commissar, a statement in fractured English was proposed in which the U.N. command would agree to stop using “poison gas, germ weapons, experiment object of A-Bomb”—and, to stop screening prisoners for repatriation. After several days of exchanging drafts with the Communists to determine their price for Dodd's release, Colson signed a statement assuring that in the future, “the prisoners of war can expect humane treatment” and promising that after Dodd's release, “there will be no more forcible screening” of any prisoners. Dodd was released May 11. The next day Ridgway turned over his command to Clark.

Colson had no idea that his words would be used against the Allies in negotiations or in press and propaganda the world over to undercut the last remaining principle for which the Allied troops were fighting: the right of voluntary repatriation. Clark later overrode a court of inquiry that largely exonerated Dodd and Colson. He appointed his own court, which demoted each to colonel. They were then exiled to rear-echelon jobs in Japan, and their military careers were effectively ended. General Yount, the Pusan base commander, received a reprimand for not keeping closer surveillance over the negotiations,
although it is hard to see why he was brought in except to increase the number of scapegoats for the omissions of higher headquarters. Clark wrote later that he would have “let them keep that dumb son of a bitch Dodd, and then go in and level the place.”

In the denouement, that is more or less what happened, although happily for Dodd, he was well out of the way. On May 13, wasting no time, Clark sent in Brigadier General Haydon “Bull” Boatner, assistant commander of the 2nd Division and an old China hand who had served in World War II under Vinegar Joe Stilwell. He spoke Chinese fluently, understood the Asian sense of hierarchy and face, and was not an especially nice man. John E. Murray, whose warnings had gone for nothing, recalled years later in his own retirement as a major general that Boatner's large round face with its thin lips “always looked like he was ready to spit.” Boatner was not very smart, either. As Major General Thomas Watlington remarked in a letter to Murray, “I have known three ‘Bulls’ in the Army, and all were nicknamed not for their size but their brains. I cannot truthfully say that Boatner is the most stupid of the three, for comparison of superlatives is not easy.”

But Boatner did not have to be particularly smart; he merely had to know precisely what his orders were and carry them out efficiently. Clark told him he was “to regain control of the rebellious prisoners on Koje and maintain control thereafter.” His policy was sharply enunciated after he received a demanding message from one prisoner compound. “Prisoners of war do not negotiate,” Clark shouted at a surprised subordinate. Boatner quickly set about building stronger, smaller prison enclosures, each holding between 500 and 1,000 men, as International Red Cross representatives had previously recommended in vain. To start the transfer, he baited the Chinese prisoners by expressing amazement that they would take orders from Koreans, who were descendants of their former slaves. Meanwhile, he received reinforcements in the form of paratroopers of the 187th Regimental Combat Team, one of the best battle-tested units in Korea. Clark later wrote, “Staff planning for this operation was done as carefully as for any orthodox military campaign. We knew by this time that the Communist POWs were active combatants and had to be dealt with as soldiers, not as prisoners in the traditional sense.”

In an initial feint, Boatner sent infantrymen and tanks to pull down the Communist signs and banners in several compounds, demonstrating that he intended to regain control. On June 10 he massed his forces directly against the enemy command, ordering Colonel Lee to assemble the prisoners of his Compound
76 in groups of 150 for transfer to new quarters. They rallied with homemade barbed-wire clubs and flails, tent-pole pikes, and Molotov cocktails made from hoarded cooking gasoline. Half an hour after the first order, disciplined troops of the 187th advanced, using concussion grenades, tear gas, bayonets, and their fists, but not firing a shot. The first prisoners were hauled from the trenches, and hundreds more were moved out by riot tactics. After Patton tanks trained their guns on the last holdouts, they gave up; Colonel Lee was dragged away by the seat of his pants to solitary confinement for the remainder of the war. The remaining compounds were broken up, and little more was heard from Koje-do thereafter, although the issue of forced repatriation continued to the last.

A year later, when peace was finally imminent, South Korean president Syngman Rhee tried to block an armistice that would not give him the entire country. Once again, the prisoners were the markers in his gamble. Just after midnight on June 18, South Korean guards opened the gates of camps holding about thirty-five thousand North Korean POWs. They vanished into the night with the help of South Korean soldiers, who led them to hiding places and fed them. Only about nine thousand hard-core Communist POWs refused to leave, insisting on repatriation. To Rhee's chagrin, the Communist side shrugged off his provocation. An armistice was signed on July 27, 1953, leaving North and South split along the battle line, which became a demilitarized zone.

The armistice provided for a complex process of what was called “explanation” by representatives of both sides to persuade prisoners to remain or go home. But inside the barbed wire, the prisoners had chosen up sides long before, and there was no going back. LSTs brought the North Korean prisoners from Koje to Inchon on August 13, where they boarded trains for the exchange point at the demilitarized zone. The windows had been covered with wire mesh, and the Communists were warned against revealing themselves along the route. Nevertheless, they cut up their underwear, turned it into North Korean flags using dye hidden in their caps, pulled off the windows' mesh protection, and waved the improvised red-and-blue banners out the train win-dows—to an angry shower of stones thrown by schoolchildren along the route. North Korean female prisoners trashed their railroad car by smashing the windows, slashing the seat covers, urinating on the upholstery, and then, as they left, defecating in the aisle.

Defiance marked every moment of the North Koreans' return. At the demilitarized
zone, Communist Red Cross officials urged the prisoners to get rid of the uniforms that their captors had provided. They stripped themselves naked except for their Communist caps, GI shoes, and breechclouts made from towels. Snake-dancing, singing, and yelling, they were loaded onto trucks for the exchange point, whereupon they began throwing away their shoes along the dusty road to the North and repatriation.

These antics proved the futility of the exercise to the man who had conducted it, Vice Admiral C. Turner Joy, the chief Allied truce negotiator. One of his main objectives in holding out against forced repatriation had been the hope that Communist regimes would be so gravely embarrassed by mass defections that they would be undermined. “I regret to say this does not seem to have been a valid point,” the admiral later remarked drily. “Whatever temporary loss of prestige in Asia Communism suffered from the results of ‘voluntary repatriation’ has long since been overtaken by Communism's subsequent victory in the area.”

He spoke too soon. If there is any military lesson in all of this, and indeed in the Korean War itself, it comes from turning on its head General MacArthur's famous dictum: “There is no substitute for victory.” The prosperity of South Korea today, the visible crumbling of the regime in the North, and China's fundamental turn toward a market economy prove that there is a substitute: constancy of purpose, patience, and avoiding the chimera of mistaking propaganda victories for real ones. Commanders win when they recognize that tactics and politics are simply different sides of the same strategic coin, and then, as Clark did, take the political measure of their opponents. By applying just the right amount of force, to bluff and stiff his opponents and then wait them out, he proved a far better Cold War general than he ever was in World War II. It is a military lesson that holds good in any war, hot or cold.

ROBERT COWLEY

The early 1950s were an interval of mixed—and missed—historical signals. The Korean War, the most potentially explosive confrontation of the decade, had frozen along trench lines that might not have seemed out of place on the Great War's Western Front. Increasingly displeased with the sterile results of the Korean standoff, the American public waited in vain for some small frisson of hope to emerge from the hutments of Panmunjom, where negotiations for an armistice had consumed over a year without result. It was no wonder that Dwight D. Eisenhower's stunning statement on October 24, 1952, “I shall go to Korea,” clinched his campaign for the presidency. Eisenhower didn't say what he would do there or exactly how he intended to wrap up the conflict; the simple words seemed enough. And, once elected, he did go. He looked around with his trained general's eye, noting that “small attacks on small hills would not win this war.” A big offensive might produce big gains, but it might also bring in Soviet troops and tanks. Better to leave matters as they were and try to resusitate the Panmunjom negotiations. He stayed away from the place on purpose.

Then fate, in the form of actuarial probability, gave Eisenhower the advantage he needed a month and a half after he had taken office. On March 5, 1953, Stalin died, succumbing to a stroke in his fortresslike dacha outside of Moscow. The Pope of World Communism had been seventy-three. Even as he had lain unconscious, the struggle for succession began. The man who briefly emerged on top was Georgi Malenkov, but as the months passed, his hold on power became increasingly shaky. Malenkov spoke hopefully of “peaceful coexistence” with the West and made noises about a summit conference. Eisenhower stalled. He and his
secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, feared that the Soviets might use it as a platform for blocking the rearmament of West Germany.