The Korean War

An Interpretative History

Stanley Sandler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9781857285482
• eBook ISBN: 9781135363451
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

An interpretative history of the Korean War. The text examines the war within the broader context of Korea's history, offering an analysis of the course of the war, and assessing the role of both North and South Korea and the allied forces in the conflict. The study goes beyond the battlefield, to evaluate the contribution of the UN naval forces and the impact of the war on the homefront. Issues such as defectors, opposition to the war, POWs and the media are explored and original research concerning the war's origins and development is incorporated from Soviet archives. This work should prove to be of value to students and scholars of 20th-century history, particularly, those concerned with American and Pacific history.

Chapter One
Introduction

An outpouring of books, articles and film in the last decade as well as an impressive memorial on Washington, DC’s Mall have demonstrated that the Korean War (1950–53) is no longer quite “The Forgotten War”, “The Unknown War”, or “The War Before Vietnam”. But this conflict has never assumed the mythic character of, say, the American Civil War or the Second World War. Coming as it did after the clear-cut victory of the Allies over the unarguable evil of the Axis in the Second World War, the localized Korean War, with its status quo armistice, hardly seems an inspiring conflict to study. But it would be practically impossible to understand the Cold War (c. 1946– 91) without some knowledge of the Korean War.

As noted, a number of worthwhile studies of the Korean War have appeared in recent years, and several earlier accounts can be justly termed “classics”, particularly the US Army’s official and definitive first volume history of the war.¹ But there remains a need for a single-volume, concise history of the Korean War of modest length (and modest price!), which this work attempts to fulfill. It has been written for the student, researcher or general reader who may not be particularly interested in the exploits of the 999th Field Artillery Battalion or of the 334th Regiment of the Chinese People’s Volunteers, but who wishes to know what brought them to Korea in the first place. Finally, I make no apology for the military emphasis that pervades this work. “The new military history” (unoriginal term that it is) of the last several decades has concentrated on what were admittedly some neglected and significant aspects of warfare, such as women, minorities, economics, technology, the fine arts, and so on. As such, these studies were a welcome addition to the traditional “battle and king” form of military history. But, that said, the course of the Korean War was, hardly surprisingly, more affected by events on the battlefield than by any other factor. The racial integration of the US Army, the social backgrounds of ROK or US Army or Chinese People’s Volunteer officers, the comings and goings of the leaders and diplomats of the UN coalition, were all dependant on the military course of the war. Had the UN Command been thrown off the Korean peninsula in the summer of 1950, quite obviously there would have been little more than academic interest in, say, the class structure of the Korean People’s Army or the racial composition of the US Army at the time. On the other hand, this study will not neglect such topics as the UN debates on the war, racial questions, the weapons of the war, or reflections of popular culture of the war (at least in the West), but almost always in the larger context of the course of the war itself. The one exception will be in the question of the forcible repatriation of prisoners of war. That unresolved, unmilitary question caused the war to drag on for more than a year after all other significant issues between the UN coalition and the Communist side had been resolved and the battlefield had hardened into a stalemate.

If anyone in the spring of 1950 had drawn up a list of possible sites for the world’s next significant war (and, obviously, there were such persons, in the world’s foreign ministries and ministries of defence, as well as in the US State and Defense Departments), Korea would have been towards the bottom in any such compilation. The US military, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Truman administration were mildly concerned about the possibility of further armed conflict between the Democratic People’s Republic of [North] Korea and the Republic of [South] Korea, which had been conducting mutual border raids for more than a year. But most US military planners had concluded (in the little time that they had spent on the subject) that the ROK was indefensible. At any rate, Washington’s eyes were on Western Europe; the North Atlantic Treaty Organization had been founded in 1949, a year that had also seen the termination of the Berlin Airlift and the explosion of the first Soviet nuclear weapon. A Soviet thrust into Western Europe seemed a far more threatening contingency than a possible dust-up between two unattractive regimes in a bleak former Japanese colony that most Americans could not (then or now) find on a map. But Americans, much against their will, would become very well acquainted with Korea in a war that would turn out to be the third bloodiest in their history, which would enormously increase the international prestige of the new People’s Republic of China (at a cost to that regime of 360,000 casualties), and which for the Koreans themselves would prove the greatest catastrophe in their national history.

In looking back over history before 1945 it would be difficult to imagine a more homogeneous and united nation than Korea. Whatever Koreans’ differences in caste or class, they are of the same culture (with minor north— south variations) throughout the peninsula, and the Korean language—Hangul—is universal. Korean cultural homogeneity can be illustrated in its place names, a source of confusion for non-Korean UN personnel throughout the war: Inchon/Ichon, Masan/Musan, Paengnyong/ Pyongyang/Pyonggang Pyongchang, Kasan/Kaesong/Kaechon, Taejon/ Taechon, Pukchong/Pukchang, Sunuiju/ Sinanju (the last two not that far apart geographically), to take a few at random. Americans complained that “every other Korean is named Kim!” (And seemingly the other was named Lee.) Then there were the two North Korean leaders, Kim Il Sung and Kim. Il. All of this was also a tribute to the simplicity of Hangul and was reflected in the considerably higher rates of literacy discovered among North Korean POWs of the UN, compared to their Chinese comrades.

To make matters even more simple, Korea, unlike even Japan, has no dispossessed minorities and its borders have been fixed for centuries; there is no question as to where China or Russia ends and Korea begins and none of these bordering nations harbour irredentist factions or longings for “lost territories”.

Thus it was one of the great ironies of fate that two obscure US officials would casually segment this almost uniquely unified nation on the eve of Korea’s liberation from a hateful state of colonial vassalage. This cruel division, still in effect after half a century, was hardened by a bloody and destructive three-year war. And it is the final irony of Korean history that this conflict would be termed by some scholars a “civil war”.

The Korean War (25 June 1950 to 27 July 1953) emphatically marked the end of the post-Second World War era. The Sovietization of Eastern Europe, the Greek civil war, the Czech coup, and the Berlin Airlift, not to mention the “loss” of China to the communists, had all served to erode what had remained of the wartime “Grand Alliance” between the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union that had persisted through the war and to the establishment of the United Nations. But with American, British, French, Dutch, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, South African, Greek, Turkish, Filipino and Thai troops actually engaged in combat with Communist forces, the Cold War seemed obviously to have taken on a new and far more bitter dimension, and indeed, might no longer even merit the term “Cold War”. In the words of one scholar, “Without the Cold War there would have been no Korean War.”² In fact, the entry of China into the conflict in late 1950 unleashed apocalyptic imaginings of a Third World War, particularly amongst Americans. Even after the Armistice concluding the Korean War, the Cold War would continue for more than four decades.

Despite the fact that a small segment of the Soviet Union actually bordered North Korea and although the Korean War was a reflection of the global Soviet—US confrontation, both super-powers punctiliously avoided direct combat with each other. The only shooting between military forces of the US and the Soviet Union were the one-sided downings of about one dozen American military aircraft around the periphery of the USSR. So far as is known, no Soviet aircraft were ever shot down by the US Air Force outside of Korea itself and its surrounding waters; intruders were merely “shouldered aside” even though they regularly violated the airspace of the United States and its allies.

At the time, the war was viewed in the West, with few exceptions, as an act of sheer aggression by North Korea against South Korea, an aggression plotted and sustained by the Soviet Union. Western leaders remained convinced throughout the war that Korea was a mere diversion, a “sideshow” to distract attention from the real target of Soviet ambition: Western Europe. The first part of this conclusion was valid enough: Kim Il Sung did plot to invade and overthrow the Republic of Korea, and he was eventually aided and abetted in this aggression by Stalin and Mao, as more recently uncovered and released documents convincingly demonstrate. But there is no evidence whatsoever that this aggression was plotted with the object of diverting the democracies from the defence of Western Europe, which is not to say that Stalin, for one, did not welcome the diversion of men and weapons to Korea that might have gone to Western Europe.

The war had a strong, but not lasting effect on Western Europe. From 1950 on, the major diplomatic and economic efforts in the US and Western Europe shifted from post-war reconstruction to rearmament and the containment of potential Soviet aggression. Paradoxically, the bulk of this Korea-induced rearmament was directed not towards repelling Communism in Korea or in Asia, but towards blunting any Soviet incursion into Western Europe. Just as the Western allies adopted a “Europe First” strategy in the Second World War, so these same allies now gave first priority to Europe. In the words of the chief of Great Britain’s Civil Service, Lord Franks, “there was a massive rearmament programme both in the United Kingdom and in the United States and France, and, of course, it was about Western Europe.”³ Although the cost of rearmament may have hindered economic recovery, particularly in Great Britain, increased military spending and military-linked financial aid from the United States, as well as the free-spending habits of overseas American servicemen, to some extent made up the difference. Certainly by the mid-1950s, Second World War bomb damage sites were more likely to be occupied by parked automobiles than by the ruins themselves.

In the United States, which along with the Koreas and China bore the brunt of the battle, Korea put an end to President Truman’s “Fair Deal” and to a Democrat political hegemony that extended back two decades. Although it was a Democrat President who made the initially popular decision to send American troops to Korea and who had even earlier instituted a loyalty oath for federal employees, nonetheless the Republicans tarred their Democratic opponents as “soft on Communism” for not giving General MacArthur his head in a more aggressive pursuit of “victory” in Korea. The Democrats lost the 1952 elections badly to the Republicans under General Eisenhower—who then settled for a status quo armistice as a “substitute for victory”. By then only the extreme right-wing of the Republican Party cared much one way or another about the outcome of this now deeply resented conflict. The war had gone on far too long for most Americans, who sullenly accepted the armistice agreement, when they even thought about it.

American military officers bitterly complained about having to “fight with one arm tied behind our backs”. US Air Force jet pilots could see the dust trails kicked up by enemy MiG fighters as they took off unmolested from airfields in their Manchurian “sanctuaries”. They could bomb only the Korean side of the Yalu border bridges, nuclear weapons were never used, and, of course, they could not drive once again, all-out for the Yalu and victory in Korea.

Yet these strong feelings overlooked the fact that the Communists also did not throw their full weight into the Korean War, a fact that more thoughtful observers readily acknowledged. UN truck convoys could head for the battlefields, filled with munitions and supplies, with headlights blazing; the Communists never sent anything more than heckling warplanes south of “MiG Alley”. UN ships could approach the South Korean coast and unload at the vital port of Pusan absolutely unmolested by enemy air power or submarines. In fact, Communist submarine attacks on slow-moving, unconvoyed UN ships heading for Pusan during the most critical days of the Pusan Perimeter battles would in all likelihood have finished off US and ROK forces barely hanging on along that battleline. Both sides held off committing their full military assets for precisely the same reason: fear of igniting a major war, perhaps even the Third World War.

In the same way, war-weariness on both sides, a disgust with a seemingly endless conflict with no side gaining anything more than local advantage, led, after the death of Josef Stalin, to the signing of a long-term cease-fire.

But the armistice did not bring about the usual pell-mell disarmament that had characterized all of America’s previous post-war months. Military spending remained high, conscription was retained by all the major belligerents, and tens of thousands of American troops remained in Western Europe as well as two divisions in Korea. In fact, fiscal year 1953 saw the peak of American peacetime military spending as a percentage of gross national product. Not even the Vietnam or Reagan military run-ups surpassed this level of spending.

Certainly this conflict did not have as strong and as baleful an effect on the United States as did the Vietnam War. American troops “served their time” and went home, not to “welcoming parades, true, but also not to contempt and controversy, and soon enough melded into civil life, where most carved out respectable careers. Even in Korea itself, after a conflict that had cost the lives of about one million Koreans, the border between North and South Korea remained basically unchanged and mutual antagonism continued to fester at least as much as before the eruption of this catastrophic conflict.

This was a war with only one hero: for many Americans General Douglas MacArthur’s reputation soared well above that of the merely heroic; his removal by President Truman added a crown of martyrdom that the aging warrior was not loath to assume. But MacArthur stood alone. The resolutely plebeian Harry Truman was hardly cast in heroic mould; North Korea’s premier Kim Il Sung was a remote figure given to Stalinist exhortations that bore little relation to battlefield realities, and South Korean President Syngman Rhee was an elderly patriot who, although personally symbolizing a decades-long struggle against brutal Japanese colonial exploitation, had few evidently engaging human qualities. On the battlefields in the opening months, Eighth Army Commander Lieutenant General Walton Walker proved to be a respected, scrappy fighter more often than not at the front, but nonetheless seemed to lack something of that inspiring spark. His successors, Generals Ridgway, Van Fleet, Clark and Taylor, were then and now considered excellent soldiers, and Ridgway will always receive justified credit for rebuilding a defeated Eighth Army. But none ignited public adulation, nor indeed did they make any such attempt.

Down the line, of course, there were heroes aplenty, beginning with those valiant South Korean soldiers who strapped explosives to their bodies and threw themselves under enemy tanks in the hopeless opening days of the war. There was US Army Engineer Sergeant George D.Libby, who in the retreat from the lost battle to hold Taejon kept his body between the wounded soldiers he was evacuating by artillery tractor and intense enemy fire, bringing his charges out but dying in the end. And there was the stand of the First Battalion of the British Gloucestershire Regiment—the “Immortal Glosters”—who held their ground in the face of what for once really were overwhelming enemy forces and suffered what may well have been the highest casualties to any one unit of that level or above during the entire war. In fact, the Glosters were the only particular unit of the Korean War to achieve public acclaim. The US Marine Corps as a whole added to their well-publicized laurels, with their landing at Inchon and their fighting retreat from the Changin Reservoir. Undoubtedly there were quite similar acts of individual and unit heroism on the Communist side, acts that will unfortunately and unfairly remain unknown until the opening of files in Pyongyang and Beijing. Of course, officially, all North Korean and Chinese soldiers were heroes. This sentiment may be considered something more than mere propaganda, in view of the awesome rain of explosives, napalm and ever-burning white phosphorous that UN forces rained wholesale upon them throughout the war.

Korea has sometimes been termed “America’s first ideological war”. But the Soviet Union of Josef Stalin bore a considerably closer resemblance to that of Ivan the Terrible than to anything in Karl Marx’s dreams, and the United States had been moving away from pure capitalism for decades. Korea did not unleash great surges of marital or patriotic sentiment in the United States, or in any of the other UN participants for that matter, except for South Korea. The Rhee administration was notorious for its “spontaneous” demonstrations that could rival anything even the Communists might lay on. For most Americans the Communist leaders were as remote and as incomprehensible and their regimes as repulsive as the Nazis or Japanese of the Second World War. In America itself there were literally tens of thousands of refugees from Communism who could vividly testify as to its bloody and “un-American” character, its atheism, its immorality. They in truth needed no Senator Joseph McCarthy (R—Wisconsin) to elucidate the dangers posed by “the Reds”, foreign or domestic. Americans before Pearl Harbor could vigorously debate whether Hitler truly posed a threat to the Western Hemisphere. But there seemed no argument that a Soviet Union, led by a Josef Stalin, armed with nuclear bombs given away by British and American traitors and deliverable by copy-cat American B–29 strategic bombers was very definitely an immediate and mortal danger. And when a mere 22 misguided American POWs refused repatriation at the end of the war the worst fears of Americans seemed realized. Insidious Communist doctrines could be literally implanted in the brains even of American soldiers (“brainwashing”), something unheard of in that nation’s previous wars.

The Communists were possessed of their own ideology, that saw the South Koreans as “puppets” of the United States, whose “ruling class” was the centre of world reaction to the inevitable victory of utopian communism, particularly of the variety practiced and preached by the Chinese Communists. In addition, the North Koreans were fighting for the unity of their cruelly amputated nation; they held the inestimable advantage of knowing that if they won, their nation would be reunited. Thus the Americans were doubly accursed for selfishly opposing the historic march of socialism/ Communism and for perversely resisting the righteous cause of Korean reunification.

An ideologically divisive aspect of this war could be seen in the mass flight of refugees. In most cases they fled towards UN lines; the most egregious example was the evacuation of nearly 100,000 North Korean civilians along with UN forces from the east coast port of Hungnam during the great retreat in the face of Chinese entry into the war. “Progressive” writers argued that such refugees were simply fleeing the fighting. (But why almost always to the south, that is, to UN forces?) Or they asserted that these civilians had nowhere else to go because insensate UN bombing and shelling had destroyed all shelter. (But why such flocks of refugees in the balmy summer of 1950?) It is still difficult to explain why so many workers and peasants would flee from the workers’ and peasants’ armies, which would presumably soon render them succour, unless they really believed that the UN forces could do more for them.

Peace in Korea was delayed for almost two years by the very ideological question of the disposition of Communist POWs who refused repatriation. The basic formula for a status quo cease-fire had been worked out in a matter of months in 1951, as both sides realized that victory in Korea could be achieved only at a cost they were not willing to pay. But the ac...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Illustrations
• Maps
• Chapter One: Introduction
• Chapter Two: History and Background
• Chapter Three: Invasion and Retreat
• Chapter Four: The Pusan Perimeter
• Chapter Five: Inchon Landings and Pursuit Northward
• Chapter Six: The UNC Drive North
• Chapter Seven: China’s Intervention and the Second Great UN Retreat
• Chapter Eight: Chinese Offensives and Stabilization of the Battlelines
• Chapter Nine: The United Nations’ First War
• Chapter Ten: The Air and Naval War
• Chapter Eleven: Behind the Lines
• Chapter Twelve: Home Fronts
• Chapter Thirteen: Fighting and Negotiating
• Chapter Fourteen: Conclusions
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Chronology