The Korean War: A History (5 page)

Virtually any village suspected of harboring or supporting guerrillas was burned to the ground, usually from the air. Furthermore, cities and towns thought to be leftist in inclination were simply emptied of their population through forced evacuations. All but 10 percent of civilians were moved out of Sunchon, Masan was emptied of tens of thousands of citizens, “all civilians” were moved out of Yechon. Amid a threat that “the leftists and Fifth column, living in Taegu, are conspiring to create a big disturbance,” and with the perimeter under great strain, vast numbers of Taegu citizens were evacuated for fear of “an uprising.” By mid-August, many of these removed citizens were concentrated on islands near Pusan, forbidden to leave.
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Still, by this time the North Koreans were badly outnumbered. MacArthur had succeeded in committing most of the battle-ready divisions in the entire American armed forces to the Korean fighting; by September 8 all available combat-trained army units had been dispatched to Korea except for the 82nd Airborne Division. Although many of these units were with the impending Inchon amphibious operation, some 83,000 American soldiers and another 57,000 South Korean and British faced the North Koreans along the front. By this time the Americans had five times as many tanks as the KPA, their artillery was vastly superior, and they had complete control of the air since the early days of the war.

At the end of August North Korean forces launched their last major offensive along the perimeter, making “startling gains” over the next two weeks, which severely strained the UN lines. On August 28, Gen. Pang Ho-san ordered his troops to take Masan and Pusan in the next few days; three KPA battalions succeeded in crossing the Naktong River in the central sector, Pohang and Chinju were lost, and the perimeter was “near the breaking point” with KPA forces pressing on Kyongju, Masan, and Taegu. U.S. commanders relocated Eighth Army headquarters from Taegu to
Pusan, and prominent South Koreans began leaving Pusan for Tsushima. On September 9, Kim Il Sung said the war had reached an “extremely harsh, decisive stage,” with the enemy being pressed on three fronts; two days later U.S. commanders reported that the frontline situation was the most dangerous since the perimeter had been established. “After two weeks of the heaviest fighting of the war,” Appleman wrote, UN forces “had just barely turned back the great North Korean offensive.” American casualties were the highest of the war to date, totaling 20,000, with 4,280 dead, by September 15.

In mid-September 1950, General MacArthur masterminded his last hurrah, a tactically brilliant amphibious landing at Inchon that brought American armed forces back to Seoul five years after they first set foot on Korean soil. Inchon Harbor has treacherous tides that can easily ground a flotilla of ships if they choose the wrong time, but the American passage through the shifting bays and flats was flawless. Adm. Arthur Dewey Struble, the navy’s crack amphibious expert who led the World War II landing operations at Leyte in the Philippines and who directed the naval operations off Omaha Beach during the Normandy invasion, commanded an enormous fleet of 270 ships in the Inchon operations, depositing eighty thousand marines with hardly a loss. The marines landed mostly unopposed, but then slogged through a deadly gauntlet before Seoul finally fell at the end of September. Against this the North Koreans could do nothing; Kim Il Sung placed about two thousand poorly trained troops to defend the harbor, and for unknown reasons, failed to mine the port. They were not surprised by the invasion, as the American mythology has it, but could not resist it and so began what their historians call euphemistically “the great strategic retreat.”

Regular North Korean forces continued pulling back in the face of the American decision to launch attacks across the parallel in early October, luring the enemy in deep, influencing MacArthur to split his forces into two huge columns against much contrary advice,
and imploring their Chinese allies to come to their aid. Captured documents show that the North made a critical decision to fight the Americans at key points to cover a general withdrawal of their forces; a captured notebook quoted Pak Ki-song, chief of political intelligence in the KPA 8th Division:

Another KPA officer captured at the time of the joint Sino-Korean offensive said that until late November, the KPA had been “continuously withdrawing”:

He said that combined KPA and Chinese forces striking from the front would be aided by “eight strong corps which will harass and attack the enemy from the rear.”
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Although large numbers of foot-soldiers were captured in MacArthur’s trap, most officers escaped and led large units back through the mountains and into the North. Many guerrillas also escaped into mountainous areas of the South, and became a major problem for American forces in the winter of 1950–51. (In early 1951 KPA forces had moved back as far south as
Andong and Sangju in North Kyongsang province to envelop UN troops.)

Shortly after the Inchon landing, a document was retrieved giving Kim Il Sung’s epitaph on the southern fighting: “The original plan was to end the war in a month,” he said, but “we could not stamp out four American divisions.” The units that had captured Seoul disobeyed orders by not marching southward promptly, thereby giving “a breathing spell” to the Americans. From the beginning, “our primary enemy was the American soldiers,” but he acknowledged that “we were taken by surprise when United Nations troops and the American Air Force and Navy moved in.” This suggests that Kim anticipated the involvement of American ground forces (probably drawn from U.S. troops stationed in Japan), but not in such size, and not with air and naval units—a curious oversight, unless the Koreans thought that Soviet air and naval power would either deter or confront their American counterparts. It would have been hard for anyone, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to imagine that the vast majority of American battle-ready infantry would be transferred around the globe to this small peninsula, of seeming marginal import to U.S. global strategy.

The war for the South left 111,000 South Koreans killed, 106,000 wounded, and 57,000 missing; 314,000 homes had been destroyed, 244,000 damaged. American casualties totaled 6,954 dead, 13,659 wounded, and 3,877 missing in action. North Korean military casualties are not known with any certainty, but probably totaled at least 50,000.

The American-led forces might have reestablished the 38th parallel and called the war a success for the containment doctrine. It would have been a surgically precise intervention, short but arduous, a sweet and telling defeat for the Communists and clear evidence
of American credibility. No one could ever have taken this victory away from Harry Truman. But as the war proceeded during the summer, nearly all of Truman’s high advisers decided that the chance had come not only to contain Communist aggression, but to roll it back. Truman approved a march north toward the end of August; the evidence is clear that the decision to invade the North was made in Washington, not in Tokyo. The historian D. Clayton James remarked that this decision “must rank in quixotism with the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961,” but he thinks it resulted from “groupthink” in Washington. Not so: it was the logical follow-on to the debate over containment and rollback bubbling along in the Truman administration for more than a year. But James is right that civilian centrality—Acheson’s centrality—in the key decisions, first to defend the South and then to invade the North, separated Korea dramatically from the shared and collegial civil-military decision making of World War II.
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The decision was embodied in NSC document number 81, written mostly by Dean Rusk, which authorized MacArthur to move into North Korea if there were no Soviet or Chinese threats to intervene. It explicitly called for “a roll-back” of the North Korean regime; war dispatches routinely referred to the “liberated areas” in the North. At first he was told to use only Korean units in operations near the Chinese border, but soon the JCS told MacArthur to feel unhindered. MacArthur was correct in telling senators in 1951 that the crossing of the parallel “had the most complete and absolute approval of every section of the American government,” if we grant him the license of mild exaggeration owed to a person who had been badly blindsided by Truman-aligned reconstructions of history.

Kim Il Sung crossed the five-year-old 38th parallel, not an international boundary like that between Iraq and Kuwait, or Germany and Poland; instead it bisected a nation that had a rare and well-recognized unitary existence going back to antiquity. The counter-logic implied by saying “Koreans invade Korea” disrupts the
received wisdom or renders a logical reconstruction of the official American position impossible. In the most influential American book on justice in war, Michael Walzer defends the Truman administration’s initial intervention with the following argument: the U.S. response to North Korean aggression was correct because Truman took the problem to the United Nations, which was the legitimate organ of world decision and opinion, and thus global justice (“it was the crime of the aggressor to challenge individual and communal rights”). In justifying the American invasion of North Korea, however, the U.S. ambassador to the UN called the 38th parallel “an imaginary line.” Walzer then comments, “I will leave aside the odd notion that the 38th parallel was an imaginary line (how then did we recognize the initial aggression?).” Walzer bypasses this mouthful without further thought, because it is the essence of his argument that Truman was right to defend the 38th parallel as an international boundary—that was “the initial aggression.”
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Why is it aggression when Koreans cross the 38th parallel, but imaginary when Americans do the same thing?

In September and October the general conclusion of all American intelligence agencies was that China would not come into the war. On September 20 the CIA envisioned the possibility that Chinese “volunteers” might enter the fighting, and a month later it noted “a number of reports” that Manchurian units might be sent to Korea. However, “the odds are that Communist China, like the USSR, will not openly intervene in North Korea.” On November 1, Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, director of the CIA, accurately wrote that the Chinese “probably genuinely fear an invasion of Manchuria,” and that they would seek to establish a cordon sanitaire for border security “regardless of the increased risk of general war.” But on November 24 as MacArthur lunged toward the Yalu River border, the
CIA still found insufficient evidence to suggest a Chinese plan for “major offensive operations.” Intelligence agencies did not lack information; instead the problem resided at the level of assumptions and presuppositions: Moscow wouldn’t intervene because it would fear global war; Beijing wouldn’t either, because Moscow dictated to its leaders.

The Russians and the Chinese had a division of labor before the war started: Russian military advisers were in North Korea and Chinese military advisers were in North Vietnam in 1950. Both worked with the respective armies on strategic planning, logistics, army organization, and political controls. While the Koreans prepared their invasion, the Vietnamese “were planning a full-scale assault on the French forces along the Sino-Vietnamese border.”
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This was less a conscious or planned division of labor than a result of Soviet occupation of North Korea and Chinese occupation of northern Vietnam after World War II, and connections between Mao and Ho Chi Minh during the Yanan period.

A Chinese military intelligence group arrived in Pyongyang within three weeks of the war’s start, and as early as August 4 Mao considered intervening in Korea: if the Americans were to invade the North “we must therefore come to [North] Korea’s aid and intervene in the name of a volunteer army.” Around the time of the Inchon landing a high North Korean officer, Pak Il-yu, requested Chinese military assistance, and then on October 1 Kim Il Sung held an emergency meeting with the Chinese ambassador to plead that the PLA 13th Army Corps quickly cross the Yalu River. By then Chinese intervention was certain, the only question was the timing: on September 30 Mao told Stalin “we have decided” to send as many as twelve infantry divisions. The Kremlin, however, fretted that a big Chinese offensive against the Americans might precipitate a world war, and backed off from a previous commitment to provide airpower to protect China’s coasts. China went ahead regardless, which apparently surprised Stalin.
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North Korean and Chinese documents make clear that China
did not enter the war purely as a defensive measure to protect its border, as has long been known, but also because Mao determined early in the war that should the North Koreans falter, China had an obligation to come to their aid because of the sacrifice of so many Koreans in the Chinese revolution, the anti-Japanese resistance, and the Chinese civil war. The PRC’s Foreign Affairs Ministry referred to China’s obligations to “the Korean people who have stood on our side during the past decades.” The October 1 crossing of the 38th parallel caused Mao a sleepless night, but he made the lone decision to intervene, and informed Stalin of his decision the next day. As if some telepathy were at work, MacArthur told the Department of the Army on the same day that “the field of our military operations is limited only by military exigencies and the international boundaries of Korea. The so-called 38th Parallel, accordingly, is not a factor.”
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In other words, NSC 81, the rollback strategy itself, caused the Chinese intervention, and not the subsequent arrival of American troops at the Yalu River.