The Korean War: A History (21 page)

Kim Sok-won, right, with Defense Minister Yi Pom-sok, 1949.

The worst fighting of 1949 occurred in early August, when North Korean forces attacked ROKA units occupying a small mountain north of the 38th parallel. It went on for days, right through an important summit conference between Syngman Rhee and Chiang Kai-shek. In the early morning hours on August 4 the North opened up great barrages of artillery and mortar fire, and then at 5:30
A.M.
some 4,000 to 6,000 North Korean border guard soldiers attacked, seeking, in the KMAG commander Roberts’s words, “to recover high ground in North Korea occupied by [the] South Korean Army.” The southern side was “completely routed,” according to Ambassador Muccio; two companies of ROKA soldiers in the 18th Regiment were annihilated, leaving hundreds dead and the North in occupation of the mountain.
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On August 16, Muccio related that Rhee, in a conversation with him,

General Roberts did indeed order Southern commanders not to attack and threatened to remove KMAG if they did; British sources said that ROKA commanders’ heads “are full of ideas of recovering the North by conquest. Only the American ambassador’s stern warning that all American aid would be stopped … prevented the Army from attempting to attack across the parallel at another point when the Communists attacked at Ongjin.”
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When we now look at both sides of the parallel with the help of some new (if scattered and selective) Soviet materials, we learn that Kim Il Sung’s basic conception of a Korean War was quite similar to Rhee’s, and was influenced deeply by the August 1949 fighting: namely, attack the cul-de-sac of Ongjin, move eastward and grab Kaesong, and then see what happens. At a minimum this would establish a much more secure defense of Pyongyang, which was quite vulnerable from Ongjin and Kaesong. At maximum it might open Seoul to his forces—that is, if the southern army collapsed, he could move on to Seoul and occupy it in a few days. And here we see the significance of the collapse of the ROK 2nd and 7th divisions in late June 1950, which opened the historic invasion corridor and placed the Korean People’s Army in Seoul within three days,
and why some people with intimate knowledge of the Korean civil conflict have speculated that these divisions may have harbored a fifth column.
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The critical issue in the Soviet documents
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is a military operation to seize the Ongjin Peninsula. According to these materials, Kim Il Sung first broached the idea of an operation against Ongjin to Terenti Shtykov, the Soviet ambassador to Pyongyang, on August 12, 1949, right on the heels of the August 4 battle. Like Southern leaders, Kim Il Sung wanted to bite off a chunk of exposed territory or grab a small city—all of Kaesong, for example, or Haeju just above the parallel on Ongjin, which Southern commanders wanted to occupy in 1949–50. We also see how similar the Russians were in seeking to restrain hotheaded Korean leaders, including the chief of state. When Kim spoke about an invasion of Ongjin, two key Russian Embassy officials “tried to switch the discussion to a general theme.” The Soviet documents also demonstrate the hard-won,
learned
logic of this civil war by late 1949; namely, that both sides understood that their big power guarantors would not help them if they launched an unprovoked general attack—or even an assault on Ongjin or Chorwon. A telegram from Shtykov to Moscow in January 1950 has Kim Il Sung impatient that
the South
“is still not instigating an attack” (thus to justify his own), and the Russians in Pyongyang tell him once again that he cannot attack Ongjin without risking general civil war. (The last Southern assault across the parallel was in December 1949, led by Paek Son-yop’s brother, In-yop.)

North Korea was not ready for war, however, since it had tens of thousands of soldiers still fighting in China. It did not respond even to major provocations, such as several South Korean ships that invaded its waters and shelled a small port in the summer of 1949. Large numbers of battle-tested troops filtered back into Korea in August–September 1949, however, and again in early 1950, as the Chinese fighting ended, about 50,000 in toto (Zhang Shu-guang puts the number of Koreans fighting with the Chinese Communists
against the Japanese in northeast China at 90,000, and the number that returned to Korea at 28,000 before September 1949—and tens of thousands more returned in early 1950).
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The crack 6th Division, which acquitted itself very well in the early Korean War fighting, was wholly made up of China veterans and led by Gen. Pang Ho-san, who had gotten his original military training at the famed Whampoa Institute in the 1920s. In the spring of 1950 Kim Il Sung posted that division just above the small city of Haeju near the 38th parallel on the west coast.

Thus the 1950 logic for both sides was to see who would be stupid enough to move first, with Kim itching to invade and hoping for a clear Southern provocation, and hotheads in the South hoping to provoke an “unprovoked” assault, thus to get American help—for that was the only way the South could hope to win. Kim already had begun playing Moscow off against Beijing, too; for example, he let Shtykov overhear him say, at an apparently drunken luncheon on January 19, 1950, that if the Russians would not help him unify the country, “Mao Zedong is his friend and will always help Korea.” In general these materials underline the influence that the victory of the Chinese revolution had on North Korea, and that North Korea’s China connection was a trump card Kim could play to create some breathing room for his regime between the two Communist giants—and perhaps to bail his chestnuts out of an impending fire.

Kim also made several secret visits to Moscow and Beijing in early 1950, seeking support for an attack on the South. Based on the scattered evidence now available from Soviet archives, it appears that a wary and reluctant Stalin, who had restrained Kim for months before, changed his mind in early 1950 and approved an assault on the South. He offered Kim military equipment and sent advisers to help with planning the assault, but sought to distance the Soviet Union from Kim’s adventurism (which became evident when Kim, at the last minute in June, changed a major assault on the South designed to seize Ongjin and Kaesong, and perhaps
Seoul, into a general invasion). Little definitive information has appeared about Kim’s talks with Mao, but other evidence from the time suggests that Mao was probably more supportive than Stalin of Kim’s plans.
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In 1949–50 Syngman Rhee also tried mightily to get elements of the Truman administration (especially in the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon) to back an invasion of the North, but through the intervention and multiple visits to Seoul by his patron M. Preston Goodfellow, Rhee was told that Washington would not come to the aid of his regime unless it were attacked without provocation. Goodfellow returned from Seoul in December 1949 and had discussions with the Chinese nationalist ambassador; the momentum for attack had shifted, Goodfellow told him:

By the end of May 1950 Rhee’s government was in total disarray, having lost many seats in an election for the legislature, and with devastating internal squabbles between different factions in the forces of order. The Korean ambassador to the United States, Chang Myon, made American officials aware of this crisis—which was the main reason John Foster Dulles decided to visit Seoul one week before the conventional war began.

The conflicts examined in this chapter were punctuations in a civil war that began in 1945 with political struggles, deepened in the next two years as battles over the people’s committees culminated in a major rebellion in the fall of 1946, and then escalated to the limited warfare of guerrilla and border conflict in 1948–50. The June invasion was itself a culmination, a dénouement, that took the internal struggles to a new and decisive level, which would have ended them without outside intervention. June 25 was truly pivotal, therefore, because what might have been an ending for Koreans was the beginning for Americans—and has remained so ever since, a lightning bolt on a Sunday morning because Acheson and Truman chose to make it so. Their initial response was a limited war to restore the 38th parallel that Americans had drawn five years earlier. Soon, however, there seemed to be no limit on how this war was prosecuted.

A
mericans now in retirement will remember, perhaps, that we never won the Korean War. We helped the South defend itself in a successful war to contain communism in the summer of 1950, and then we lost our attempt to invade and overthrow communism in the North in the terrible winter of 1950–51. As the war dragged on it became as unpopular as Vietnam was by 1968, and made Harry Truman as disliked as any American president in history, with a 23 percent approval rating in December 1951 (until George W. Bush beat him).
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What hardly any Americans know or remember, however, is that we carpet-bombed the North for three years with next to no concern for civilian casualties. Even fewer will feel any connection to this. Yet when foreigners visit North Korea, this is the first thing they hear about the war. The air assaults ranged from the widespread and continual use of firebombing (mainly with napalm), to threats to use nuclear and chemical weapons, finally to the destruction of huge North Korean dams in the last stages of the war. It was an application and elaboration of the air campaigns against Japan and Germany, except that North Korea was a small Third World country that lost control of the air to the United States within days of the war’s start.

After much experimentation and scientific study by Germany, Britain, and the United States, by 1943 it became clear that “a city was easier to burn down than to blow up.” Combinations of incendiaries and conventional explosives, followed up by delayed-detonation bombs to keep firefighters at bay, could destroy large sections of a city, whereas conventional bombs had a much more limited impact. Magnesium-alloy thermite sticks, manufactured by
the million and bundled together, did the trick; when supplemented by mixtures of benzol, rubber, resins, gels, and phosphorus, they formed unprecedentedly destructive blockbuster flaming bombs that could wipe out cities in a matter of minutes (seventeen in the case of the attack on Wurzburg, March 16, 1945). The creation of urban “annihilation zones” destroyed masses of civilian lives, an outcome accepted by all sides in the war—and “by the people, parliaments, and armed forces.” And with that, in Jörg Friedrich’s words, “modernity gave itself up to a new, incalculable, and uncontrollable fate.”