The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (52 page)

ON SEPTEMBER
7, a week before Inchon, Zhai Chengwen, the Chinese political counselor in Pyongyang, was recalled by the foreign ministry. There he was asked by Zhou: if the Chinese decided to send troops to Korea, what kind of difficulties would they encounter? Zhai answered that the problems would be primarily logistical in nature. Above all they would have to solve the problem of transportation from different parts of China to the Yalu bases, and then from these bases to the battlefields. When he left Beijing, Zhai believed that the leadership had already made up its mind to intervene. He was right, but it wasn’t really the leadership, it was Mao. Much of September was deeded over to two main tasks: getting troops to Manchuria and bringing the rest of the leadership over to Mao’s view on the need to enter the war. If there was opposition, it was primarily in the Army, and even there, because the Army was always subservient to the political needs of the party, it was somewhat muffled. Lin Biao was the senior field general, and the man most Chinese and foreigners alike expected to command Chinese forces if they entered the war. Indeed for a long time during the war, because of the intense secrecy the Chinese Communists adhered to, and because UN intelligence was seriously flawed, senior Americans believed that they were fighting against forces commanded by Lin. But Lin had his own reservations. The idea that his men would be exposed to the kind of firepower possessed by the Americans was very disturbing to
him. At one point, Lin asked Zhai whether the North Koreans had the strength and the will to fight a prolonged guerrilla war against their enemies, a question that indicated his wariness of a frontal Chinese assault on American forces. His doubts were shared by others in the military and, more quietly, some in the politburo. How much more intense his opposition would have been had he known that the troops would not get promised air cover from the Soviets can only be imagined. Again and again in the three-month period from early July to late September, Mao and others spoke to Lin about commanding the Chinese troops who might fight in Korea. Each time the subject came up, Lin talked about the problems of his own personal health. That was interpreted by many to mean that he had no desire to be a part of an intervention about which he had grave reservations.

In early September, Mao gave a speech to an important party meeting that reflected his decision to intervene. The United States, he believed, would turn out to be weaker than anyone expected. It would be waging an unjust war of aggression, and this would work against the morale of its troops and their battlefield performance. America, he said, had formidable divisions politically and economically at home; it was isolated from other nations and so vulnerable to world opinion. Yes, it could produce a great deal of steel and armaments, but that would not be enough. Its supply lines were far too extended, from Berlin to Korea, reflecting the fact that its geopolitical perimeter was stretched over two vast oceans. He saw America very much through his own political bias. America’s young men had fought poorly in the early days in Korea, he believed, not because the world’s atomic superpower had let its non-nuclear weaponry slip, but because these were working-class kids fighting for capitalist aims in which they did not believe, and thus less pure of heart and motivation than the soldiers of China. The level of their fighting ability in the early days of the Korean War, he said, was below that of “Germany and Japan during World War II.” He did not fear the American’s atomic bomb; if they used it, he said, “I will respond with my hand grenade.”

His decision that China should enter the war was hardly an easy one. He slept poorly. He would often sit by himself well into the early morning hours, smoking endless cigarettes, just staring at maps of Korea and China, as if waiting for some kind of ultimate truth to emerge. But the fateful decision was always clear. China
had
to enter the war. Taiwan was crucial in all his reckoning. To Mao and others in the Chinese leadership, Taiwan was part of China. Now MacArthur was referring to it as an unsinkable aircraft carrier, which made it de facto American property. To Mao that meant a legitimate part of Chinese territory was seen by his sworn enemy as a weapon aimed against his country. For him that meant the last battle of the Chinese civil war had not yet been
fought—something few Americans in power understood. Yet an amphibious landing against a well-defended island—protected by the awesome Seventh Fleet—was almost inconceivable for so primitive an Army. Already one amphibious assault against an offshore island had gone badly, because of the Communists’ lack of air and sea power; it had taken place near the end of the civil war and had proved one of the Communists’ worst defeats of that war. Mao was pushing the Russians for airplanes and instructors to build up his Air Force as quickly as possible, but for the moment he could not move against Taiwan.

That made Korea all the more attractive. There the confrontation logistically favored the Chinese. Even though they had bases in Japan, American troops pushing north would be strung out, extremely difficult to resupply, and very vulnerable because of the nature of the terrain and weather. The Chinese would have a vast advantage in manpower; Mao could easily put in play an Army four times as large as that of the Americans, and he was sure that his troops would fight bravely and with great discipline. He did not take the ROKs seriously as a fighting force. Against the Americans he hoped to avoid direct confrontation when the enemy was looking for a fight; he preferred to strike when U.S. troops were at their most exposed and vulnerable. He believed that a confrontation with the United States was inevitable, and as such he wanted to pick the location. In addition, Mao’s own political calculations were critical in his decision-making. If he defeated the Americans in Korea, and he was sure he would, it would greatly strengthen his political control over all of China after so long and difficult a civil war. Many people in the Chinese politburo thought this was precisely the wrong time to enter a war, because the nation was exhausted and still divided, its finances dreadful, its economy in ruins. War against a rich, powerful country like the United States might only aid China’s domestic enemies. Therefore any ambitious expedition like this should be delayed. Certainly, this was what Western intelligence officials, including the top people at the Central Intelligence Agency, thought the Chinese
should
think; it was how
they
would think if they had been Chinese.

Here Mao’s domination of the politburo was crucial. The other members were seemingly peers, but he was first among nonequals. He was the embodiment of the new Chinese leadership, and they knew it and deferred to him. He was the one, they believed, who had the greatest insight into the truths of both war and politics; he had the ability to see one step ahead, or as Chen Jian, a gifted young historian at the University of Virginia, once said, he was like a great chess player competing with others who only manage to see what he sees a move or two too late. More than ever, after this decision, he became the great leader, the one the others in the politburo saw as a visionary and trusted
because they believed he knew the population better than they did. As he pondered what exactly to do about Korea, he slowly came to see the war as a potential asset, a way to show the
Chinese people
that China was indeed a new revolutionary power on a global stage, which would be a way of extending the party’s control domestically. And in this he would eventually prove right. Despite the terrible costs, financially and in human resources, the decision to enter the Korean War would, to the surprise of Western analysts, make Mao exactly the great visionary leader he imagined himself to be, who towered above everyone else. He intended to prove to ordinary Chinese that the Americans had always been their enemies and that there was no middle ground. The Chinese people who were closest to the Americans and to other foreigners were the wealthiest people in the country, and thus his domestic opponents; a war with the Americans, he believed, would help isolate them. The war was, in addition to everything else, a way of bonding the Chinese people to him. It would help him politicize the population. Later he would joke that there were only one and a half people who were in favor of going in—the half person, he said condescendingly, was Zhou Enlai.

There were other reasons to go ahead. Entering the war was proof that the new China could no longer be abused and exploited by foreign powers. Selling this idea to a vast percentage of the Chinese people, Mao was sure, would not be that hard; he had a highly nuanced feel for how much they hated the exploitation of their country by foreigners in the past. His propaganda wars had, in fact, already begun. The State Department had published its China White Paper in August 1949. The white paper was designed to relieve pressure at home, to show that the administration had done all that it could to help what was a self-destructive Nationalist government, and that the collapse was Chiang’s own fault. But it was too long and too complicated for ordinary citizens to read, and it only angered the critics, who regarded it as kicking Chiang when he was down. Almost as soon as it was issued, Styles Bridges, Bill Knowland, Pat McCarran, and Kenneth Wherry issued a statement calling it “a 1,054 page whitewash of a do-nothing policy.” In China, Mao understood immediately its unique propaganda value. To him the case that Acheson and the paper’s authors were making—of how much the United States had done for Chiang—was exactly the one he wanted to make too. It was a gift from heaven, absolute documentary evidence of how insidiously the Americans had manipulated and exploited the government of Chiang only for the good of the United States. The Americans, his line went, were never your friends—and he launched a ferocious nationwide propaganda campaign that stunned Washington, a harbinger of the fact that China’s new leaders were in no rush to become friends with the Western colossus. Mao
wrote five articles himself attacking the white paper and personally orchestrated the national campaign against it, becoming for a moment a kind of Chinese Madison Avenue man.

Mao was confident—far too confident, it would turn out—that his soldiers would prevail over the superior technology of the Americans. There was no sham to this, no touch of cynicism. This is not just what he said, but what he truly
believed,
and he never altered this view of the coming confrontation with the Americans, although by mid-October a debate would be raging with great intensity in the politburo on this question. That was when it became clear that Stalin was going to renege on his promise to provide air cover for China’s troops. In September, the Chinese had played a prolonged game of high-stakes poker with the Russians over just how much help the Russians were going to offer. Stalin was proving nervous about getting into a larger confrontation with the Americans. He had been surprised by the rapid American response to Kim’s invasion, and it had made him even more cautious than usual. The Russians, like the Chinese, had warned Kim about the possibility of a landing at Inchon. The idea of an American-sponsored military base right up on the Manchurian border was one more nightmare for Stalin, though it looked increasingly likely that that was the way the war might end.

Now, as the In Min Gun collapsed, Kim Il Sung began to increase the pressure on Stalin to save his army and his country, even though the Russians had told the Koreans from the start that they would not offer combat troops. But perhaps, Stalin told them, the Chinese might. On September 21, a week after Inchon, Stalin’s personal representative to Pyongyang, General Matvei Zakharov, urged Kim to ask for Chinese aid. The North Korean leadership was uneasy with the dependency on the Chinese that this might create, yet all the battlefield news was bad, and there was clearly no acceptable alternative. A week later the North Korean politburo finally held an emergency session at which it unanimously decided that if Seoul fell there would be no way of stopping the UN forces from crossing the parallel, and the North Koreans would need help. Kim then went to see Terenti Shtykov, the Soviet ambassador, and asked him to bring the subject of Russian troops up with Stalin. Shtykov refused to let him ask the question, and in his words a “confused, lost, hopeless and desperate” Kim and his foreign minister, Pak Hon Yong, then sent a letter to Stalin on their own. On October 1, Stalin answered that their best hope was to convince the Chinese to intervene. That night, Kim spoke to the Chinese ambassador and asked for Chinese troops. He also wanted to know whether, if the worst happened, the Chinese would allow the Koreans to set up a government in exile in their northeast.

A very delicate game was being played out between all three Communist governments. The North Koreans, who had once snubbed the Chinese, now desperately needed their help. The Chinese, thanks to Mao’s political beliefs, had decided to enter the war but did not want to tip their hand yet, because they wanted to maximize their leverage with the Russians, most particularly on the issue of air cover. In late September, the Soviets apparently agreed to supply air cover for the Chinese troops. So the forces that would lead to a terrible collision between the United States and China were now fully in motion. On September 30, two weeks after Inchon, the South Korean Second Division crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, and a week later, on October 7, troops of the American First Cavalry Division crossed it as well, on their way to the capture of Pyongyang, and right after that, involuntarily, their first unhappy meeting, in early November, with the Chinese at Unsan.