The Korean War (2 page)
38. Artillery in action:
(a) UN. (
Popperfoto
)
(b) Chinese. (
Camera Press
)
39. A British doctor treats a wounded Chinese prisoner. (
Imperial War Museum
)
40. Behind the lines:
(a) British conscripts take a beer.
(b) Australians take a shower. (
Imperial War Museum
)
41. Private William Speakman, V.C. (
Imperial War Museum
)
42. Helicopter casevac. (
Imperial War Museum
)
43. President-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower. (
Imperial War Museum
)
44. Chinese propaganda picture of UN prisoners. (
Chinese National Army Museum
)
MAPS
Retreat from the Chosin Reservoir
Foreword
In the past twenty years, the public fascination with military history has become a minor literary phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic. It has centred overwhelmingly upon the Second World War. Indeed, at the extremities of the popular market, perceptions of the struggle between the Western Allies and the Germans long ago parted company with reality, and took on the mantle of fantasy borne a generation earlier by cowboys and indians. In the past decade, more surprisingly, Vietnam has also given birth to a major publishing industry. Some new books seek seriously to examine why the United States lost that war. Others, like the films they inspire, attempt to rewrite history, to present aspects of that sordid, doomed struggle in an heroic light.
How is it, then, that the other great mid-twentieth-century conflict with communism, Korea, remains so neglected? Popular awareness of the Korean War today centres upon the television comedy show
M.A.S.H
., which dismays most veterans because it projects an image of Korea infinitely less savage than that which they recall. The United Nations suffered 142,000 casualties in the war to save South Korea from communist domination. The Koreans themselves lost at least a million people. United States losses in three years were only narrowly outstripped by those suffered in Vietnam over more than ten. Korea cost the British three times as many dead as the Falklands War. Chinese casualties remain uncertain, perhaps even in Peking, but they run into many hundreds of thousands. Since 1945, only the Cuban missile crisis has created a greater risk of nuclear war between East and West. As some recent scholarly researchers have pointed out, notable among them Dr
Rosemary Foot in her fascinating
The Wrong War
, in Korea the American military displayed a far greater private enthusiasm for using atomic weapons against the Chinese than the Western world perceived, even a generation later. Korea remains the only conflict since 1945 in which the armies of two great powers – for surely China’s size confers that title – have met on the battlefield.
Many Westerners were happy to forget Korea for a generation after the war ended, soured by the taste of costly stalemate, robbed of any hint of glory. Yet consider the extraordinary cast of American characters that came together to determine the fate of that barren Asian peninsula: Truman and Acheson, Marshall and MacArthur, Ridgway and Bradley. Then add the succession of great military dramas – the destruction of Task Force Smith, the defence of the Pusan Perimeter, Inchon, the drive to the Yalu, the shattering winter advance of the Chinese. A host of lesser epics followed, which may be allowed to include the stand of the British 29 Brigade on the Imjin in April 1951, an action relatively minor in scale, yet the ferocity of which caught the imagination of the world. The fascination of Korea centres, more than anything, upon the battlefield confrontation between the armies of China and the United States. But the tragedy of the Korean people, the principal sufferers in the three-year struggle across their land, deserves far greater attention than it has been granted.
Above all, perhaps, Korea merits close consideration as a military rehearsal for the subsequent disaster in Vietnam. So many of the ingredients of the Indochina tragedy were already visible a decade or two earlier in Korea: the political difficulty of sustaining an unpopular and autocratic regime; the problems of creating a credible local army in a corrupt society; the fateful cost of underestimating the power of an Asian communist army. For all the undoubted benefits of air superiority and close support, Korea vividly displayed the difficulties of using air power effectively against a primitive economy, a peasant army. The war also demonstrated the problem of deploying a highly mechanised Western army in broken country, against a lightly equipped foe. Many of
the American professional soldiers who served under MacArthur or Ridgway did so later under Westmoreland or Abrams. When they reminisce about the campaigns of 1950–53, it is striking how frequently slips of the tongue cause them to substitute ‘Vietnam’ for ‘Korea’ in their conversation.
Yet because it proved possible finally to stabilise the battle in Korea on terms which allowed the United Nations – or more realistically, the United States – to deploy its vast firepower from fixed positions, to defeat the advance of the massed communist armies, many of the lessons of Korea were misunderstood, or not learned at all. For instance, Pentagon studies showed during Korea, just as they had during World War II, that it was America’s lower socio-economic groups which bore the chief burden of fighting the war, and above all of filling the ranks of the infantry. Yet the same phenomenon would recur in Vietnam, and the serious shortcomings of the American footsoldier – the man at the tip of the spear – would once more have critical consequences. In Korea, the communists enjoyed the opportunity to learn a great deal about the limits of Western patience, the difficulties of maintaining popular enthusiasm for an uncertain cause in a democracy. By the time the armistice was signed at Panmunjom in August 1953, after a mere three years of hostilities, the Western Allies had become desperate to extricate themselves from a thankless war that offered so little prospect of glory or clear-cut victory. Yet in Korea, the communists had provided the most ruthlessly simple
casus belli
, the most incontrovertible provocation by aggression, to be offered to the West at any period between 1945 and this time of writing.
As in my past books, I have sought to explore the Korean War through a combination of personal interviews with surviving participants, and archival research in London and Washington. In the course of writing it, I have met more than two hundred American, Canadian, British, and Korean veterans of the conflict. Perhaps the most exciting aspect of my research has been the opportunity to talk to Chinese veterans, granted to me in 1985 through the good offices of the Peking Institute of Strategic Studies, and the help of
the late and much-lamented Colonel Jonathan Alford of the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London. One of the possibilities that first attracted me to the project was that, in the new mood of détente between China and the West, it might be possible to gain some access to a Peking perspective upon the Korean War. After months of discussion and correspondence, this indeed proved to be so.
There are no German or Japanese triumphal museums commemorating World War II. It is an eerie experience for a Westerner to walk through the great halls of the Peking Military Museum, gazing upon the trophies of captured British bren guns and regimental flashes, American .50 calibre machine guns, helmets and aircraft remains. Yet if my visit was a measure of how much has changed between China and the West, it was also a reminder of how much remains the same. There is still a great display given over to America’s supposed 1952 ‘bacteriological warfare campaign’ against North Korea. China claims to have inflicted 1,090,000 casualties on the US armed forces in Korea, a figure one assumes was arrived at by adding a few thousands to the total Chinese casualties claimed by the US. I spent some fascinating days and nights in Peking and Shanghai, listening to Chinese veterans describing their battlefield experience in Korea. Yet it must be said that none deviated for a moment from strict Party orthodoxy in describing their enthusiasm for the war, and satisfaction with the manner in which it was conducted. There is no comparison with the experience of interviewing British and American veterans, whose views reflect such a wide and forthright range of opinion. In Peking, senior officers gave me some fascinating explanations of Chinese behaviour. At their Command and Staff College, I gained some glimpses of the PLA’s military perspective upon various battles. But there remains, of course, no opportunity to check official assertions against archives or written evidence. In a totalitarian state, such as China remains, it is debatable whether even those at the summit of power can discover the historical truth about events in the recent past, even should they wish to do
so. In the same fashion, when Mr Gorbachev claims in a speech that the Soviet Union won the Second World War effectively unaided, it seems rash to assume that he is perpetrating a conscious untruth. It may yet be that he, like the vast majority of his people, simply does not know any better.
During my researches in Korea, I must acknowledge an important debt to the US Commander-in-Chief there, General Paul Livsey, who also served during the war as a young platoon commander; to British and American officers who provided me with facilities to visit key locations such as Panmunjom and Gloucester Hill; and above all, to Brigadier Brian Burditt, who stayed on in Korea after the end of his tour of duty as British Military Attaché, to act as my mentor and guide, and to arrange some fascinating interviews with Korean veterans of the war. I made a decision from the outset to make no approaches to Pyongyang while writing the book. If truth remains an elusive commodity in China, in North Korea it is entirely displaced by fantasy. It seems impossible to gain any worthwhile insights into the North Korean view of the war, as long as Kim Il Sung presides over a society in which the private possession of a bicycle is considered a threat to national security.
General Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley was himself writing the British official history of the Korean War while I was working on my own book. With characteristic generosity, he arranged for me to have access to some of the key official files in his care. He himself remains, of course, one of the most fascinating witnesses of the Korean drama. Not only was he awarded the DSO for his performance as adjutant of the Gloucesters in their stand on the Imjin in April 1951, but he returned from two years’ Chinese captivity with a reputation for indomitable courage and determination. His official history will clarify much about British participation in the war, and no doubt add new revelations. He was good enough to read this narrative in proof, though naturally he bears no responsibility for my errors or judgements.
In Britain and the United States, I interviewed as wide a cross-section as possible of officers and men of all three services. I did
not seek meetings with a handful of the most senior officers who survive, because of their great age. From past experience, I have found that very elderly veterans have long ago said and written all that they wish about their great campaigns. To discuss these again merely starts a conversational train running upon familiar railway lines. It becomes fraudulent to acknowledge their assistance, because it is so seldom that they wish to say anything of substance. After thirty-five years, with very rare exceptions the most helpful witnesses about the conduct of a campaign are those who held regimental and battalion commands, and staff officers who served under the principal commanders, whose memories are often remarkable. I shall always cherish the four-hour word portrait of MacArthur’s headquarters at the Dai Ichi drawn for me by that great and wholly delightful American soldier who served there in 1950, Colonel Fred Ladd. Likewise, I am much indebted to Brigadier-General Ed Simmons, USMC, who is not only director of the Marine Corps Museum in Washington, but also a veteran of the Chosin campaign, and an uncommonly shrewd critic of the Korean experience.
This book, like those I have written upon other campaigns, does not purport to be a comprehensive history. The most scholarly account of pre-war Korea is that of Bruce Cumings. Even after twenty-five years, the British author David Rees’
Korea: The Limited War
remains the best-written overall narrative, above all about the American political aspects. More recently, Joseph Goulden has uncovered many new American archival sources for his
Korea: The Untold Story
. Dr Rosemary Foot of the University of Sussex, another distinguished researcher of the period, was characteristically generous in discussing with me her own reflections and sources about the political dimensions of the war. To all these authors and books, I acknowledge my indebtedness for important lines of thought. I have not attempted to emulate them. I have written relatively little about aspects of the Korean conflict, such as MacArthur’s dismissal, which have been exhaustively discussed elsewhere. Instead, I have sought to paint a portrait of the war, focusing upon some human
and military aspects less familiar to readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Because I am an Englishman, I have devoted more space to the experience of British servicemen in Korea than their proportionate contribution to the struggle justifies. But it seems reasonable to suggest that a British officer’s or private soldier’s recollection of the experience of fighting the Chinese is no less valid, as a contribution to understanding what the war was like, than that of an American, a Canadian, an Australian, a Frenchman. The ranks attributed to officers and men in the text are those they held at the dates concerned. I have retained old-fashioned spellings of Chinese names, which are likely to be more familiar to Western readers than the newer versions.
