The Korean War: A History (4 page)

South of the attacking KPA units was the ROK 7th Division, headquartered at the critical invasion-route town of Uijongbu; it had not committed its forces to battle even by the morning of June 26, probably because it was waiting to be reinforced by the 2nd Division, which had entrained northward from Taejon. When the 2nd Division arrived later that day, it collapsed and the troops panicked. It was through this gaping hole in the Uijongbu corridor that North Korean troops poured on the afternoon and evening of June 26, thus jeopardizing the capital. An American official on the scene later wrote that “the failure of the 2nd Division to fight” was the main reason for the quick loss of Seoul. South Korean units mutinied or
fled before the oncoming Northern troops for many reasons, including their relative lack of firepower, their poor training, their officers who had served Japan, and ultimately the unpopularity of the Rhee government—which had nearly been voted out by a moderate coalition in reasonably free elections held on May 30, 1950.

President Rhee tried to leave the city with his top officials as early as Sunday evening, and on June 27 the entire ROK Army headquarters relocated south of Seoul, without telling their American allies. That left troops engaging the enemy north of Seoul without communications, and panicked both the troops and the civilian population. The next day most ROK divisions followed suit, withdrawing to the south of the capital, and Gen. “Fatty” Chae famously and egregiously blew the major Han River bridge without warning, killing hundreds who were crossing it. Later that day President Rhee took off southward in his special train. During the battle for Taejon he vowed to stay there and fight to the death, but soon he was back on his train, headed for the southwestern port of Mokpo, thence by naval launch to Pusan, where he would remain inside the defensive perimeter.
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Military morale evaporated and civilians panicked. Seoul fell to a Northern invasion force of about 37,000 troops. By month’s end fully half of the ROKA soldiers were dead, captured, or missing. Only two divisions had their equipment and weapons, all the rest (about 70 percent of the total) having been left in place or lost on the battlefield.

The quick and virtually complete collapse of resistance in the South energized the United States to enter the war in force. Secretary of State Dean Acheson dominated the decision making, which soon committed American air and ground forces to the fight. On the night of June 24 (Washington time), Acheson decided to take the Korean question to the UN, before he had notified President Truman of the fighting; he then told Truman there was no need to have him back in Washington until the next day. At emergency White House meetings on the evening of June 25, Acheson argued for increased military aid to the ROK, U.S. Air Force cover for the
evacuation of Americans, and the interposition of the Seventh Fleet between Taiwan and the China mainland—thus obviating a Communist invasion of the island, dividing China and leaving Taiwan governed by the Republic of China even today. On the afternoon of June 26 Acheson labored alone on the fundamental decisions committing American air and naval power to the Korean War, which were approved by the White House that evening.

Thus the decision to intervene in force was Acheson’s decision, supported by the president but taken before United Nations, Pentagon, or congressional approval. His reasoning had little to do with Korea’s strategic value, and everything to do with American prestige and political economy: “prestige is the shadow cast by power,” he once said, and the North Koreans had challenged it; American credibility was therefore at stake. South Korea was also essential to Japan’s industrial revival, Acheson thought, as part of his “great crescent” strategy linking northeast Asia with the Middle East (and which we discuss later on).

George Kennan, who supported the June decisions, recalled from notes taken at the time that Acheson broke off collegial discussions on the afternoon of June 26:

Acheson later concurred with Kennan, saying, “that’s as I recall it.” Kennan noted that the decisions of June 26 were the key ones; Acheson agreed that they were taken before congressional or UN
consultations (“it wasn’t until 3:00 in the afternoon [on June 27] that the U.N. asked us to do what we said we were going to … in the morning”).
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On this same summer Saturday evening the Soviet ambassador to the UN, Adam Malik, was taking his ease on Long Island rather than wielding his much used and abused veto on the Security Council, a boycott conducted ostensibly because the UN had refused to admit China. He was planning to return to Moscow for consultations on July 6.
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The longtime Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, later told Dean Rusk that on Saturday night Malik instantly wired Moscow for instructions, and for the first time ever in its experience got back a message direct from Generalissimo Stalin:
nyet
, do not attend.
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Stalin’s reasons are not known, but he may have hoped to facilitate the entry of U.S. forces into a peripheral area, thus to waste blood and treasure, or perhaps he hoped that American dominance of the UN would destroy the perceived universality of the international body.

Acheson’s June 25–26 decisions prefigured the commitment of American ground forces, which came in the early hours of June 30. The Joint Chiefs of Staff remained “extremely reluctant” to commit infantry troops to the fighting right up to June 30, and were not consulted when Truman made his decision. They were reticent both because Korea was a strategic cul-de-sac and perhaps a trap in the global struggle with Moscow, and because the total armed strength of the U.S. Army was 593,167, with an additional 75,370 in the Marines. North Korea alone was capable of mobilizing upward of 200,000 combat soldiers in the summer of 1950, quite apart from the immense manpower reserve of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

The immediate precipitating factor for the decision to dispatch U.S. ground forces was MacArthur’s conclusion, after visiting the front lines, that the ROK Army had mostly ceased to fight. From the start of the war and throughout the summer and fall of 1950, Korean units ceased to exist, lacked equipment to fight the North
Koreans, or proved unable to hold the lines in their sectors. Most veterans of the first two years of the war thought South Koreans “did no fighting worthy of the name,” they just broke and ran. (By the summer of 1951 the ROKA had lost enough matériel to outfit ten divisions, according to Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway, and still needed “thorough training and equipment and instruction on all levels.”) An American colonel told the British journalist Philip Knightly, “South Koreans and North Koreans are identical. Why then do North Koreans fight like tigers and South Koreans run like sheep?” The Morse code “HA” was used all over the front to signal that South Korean forces were “hauling ass.” ROKA officers exploited their own men, and beat them mercilessly for infractions. One GI observed an officer execute a man for going AWOL, shooting him in the back of the head and kicking him into a grave. The man had a wife and three children. But racism also infected GI views of their Korean enemy and ally. Most Americans, a veteran remembered, “had an ingrained prejudice against Koreans” that made any kind of empathy or understanding difficult. “They hated Koreans by reflex action.” It was only after truce talks began in 1951 that the ROKA had the time to develop, however slowly, its fighting temper.
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But the Americans also had no idea that they would be fighting against truly effective troops, a disastrous misjudgment of the Korean enemy that began right at the top, on the day the war began. “I can handle it with one arm tied behind my back,” MacArthur said; the next day he remarked to John Foster Dulles that if he could only put the 1st Cavalry Division into Korea, “why, heavens, you’d see these fellows scuttle up to the Manchurian border so quick, you would see no more of them.” At first MacArthur wanted an American regimental combat team, then two divisions. Within a week, however, he cabled Washington that only a quarter of the ROKA troops could even be located, and that the KPA was “operating under excellent top level guidance and had demonstrated superior
command of strategic and tactical principles.” By the beginning of July he wanted a minimum of 30,000 American combat soldiers, meaning more than four infantry divisions, three tank battalions, and assorted artillery; a week later he asked for eight divisions.
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Misjudgments also grew out of the ubiquitous racism of whites coming from a segregated American society, where Koreans were “people of color” subjected to apartheid-like restrictions (they drank from “colored” fountains in Virginia, could not marry Caucasians in other southern states, and could not own property in many western states). Consider the judgment of the respected military editor of
The New York Times
, Hanson Baldwin, three weeks after the war began:

Chinese Communists were reported to have joined the fighting, he erred in saying, and not far behind might be “Mongolians, Soviet Asiatics and a variety of races”—some of “the most primitive of peoples.” Elsewhere Baldwin likened the Koreans to invading locusts; he ended by recommending that Americans be given “more realistic training to meet the barbarian discipline of the armored horde.”
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A few days later Baldwin remarked that to the Korean, life is cheap: “behind him stand the hordes of Asia. Ahead of him lies the hope of loot.” What else “brings him shrieking on,” what else explains his “fanatical determination”?
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Mongolians, Asiatics, Nazis, locusts, primitives, hordes, thieves—one would think Baldwin had exhausted his bag of bigotry to capture a people invading their
homeland and defending it against the world’s most powerful army. But he came up with another way to deal with “the problem of the convinced fanatic”:

(A pacification, perhaps, like that in the Ukraine.)

Somewhat uncomfortable with North Korean indignation about “women and children slain by American bombs,” Baldwin went on to say that Koreans must understand that “we do not come merely to bring devastation.” Americans must convince “these simple, primitive, and barbaric peoples … that we—not the Communists—are their friends.”
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Now hear the chief counsel for war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials, Telford Taylor:

In the summer months of 1950 the Korean People’s Army pushed southward with dramatic success, with one humiliating defeat after another for American forces. An army that had bested Germany and Japan found its back pressed to the wall by what it thought was a hastily assembled peasant military, ill-equipped and, worse, said to be doing the bidding of a foreign imperial power. By the end of July, American and ROK forces outnumbered the KPA along the front, 92,000 to 70,000 (47,000 were Americans), but in spite of this, the retreat continued. In early August, however, the 1st Marine
Brigade went into action and finally halted the KPA advance. The front did not change much from then until the end of August. The fighting stabilized at what came to be called the Pusan Perimeter, an eighty-by-fifty-mile right-angled front. Kim Il Sung later said that the plan was to win the war for the South in one month, and by the end of July he had nearly done so.

This perimeter had its northern anchor on the coast around Pohang, its southeastern anchor in the coastal Chinju-Masan region, and its center just above the major city of Taegu. The latter became a symbol of the American determination to stanch the KPA’s advance; but it was Pohang in the northeast that was probably the key to stopping the KPA from occupying Pusan and unifying the peninsula. Roy Appleman wrote that the “major tactical mistake” of the North Koreans was not to press their advantage on the northeast coastal road. The KPA 5th Division worried too much about covering its flanks, instead of moving quickly on Pohang and thence combining with the 6th Division marching from the southeast to menace Pusan.

Northern forces had paused south of the capital for nearly a week before restarting a dual-pincer, tank-led blitzkrieg to the southwest and southeast. This pause has caused some historians to wonder if the initial thrust was aimed mainly at Seoul, the nerve center of the South, hoping to hold it and watch the Rhee regime collapse; in any case the pause gave vital time to MacArthur to organize a defensive line in the southeast. This perimeter became the place where American power finally stiffened. North Korea had brought its forces along the perimeter to 98,000, and thousands of guerrillas, including many women, were active in the fighting. In August Gen. John H. Church, commander of the 24th Infantry Division and a veteran of the Anzio campaign, concluded that Korea was not like the European battles of World War II: “It’s an entirely different kind of warfare, this is really guerrilla warfare.” It was “essentially a guerrilla war over rugged territory,” according to British sources; American troops were “constantly exposed to the threat of
infiltration by guerrillas sweeping down from the hills into and behind its positions.”
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