The Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, of the British 27 Brigade, took part in a skirmish near the Chongchon river, which cost them five killed and six wounded. They advanced cautiously forward to examine the scattered bodies of the communists on the hillside.
‘They were unlike any enemy I had seen before,’ wrote Lieutenant Colin Mitchell. ‘They wore thick padded clothing, which made them look like little Michelin men. I turned one body over with my foot, and saw that he wore a peaked cap with a red star badge. These soldiers were Chinese. I then turned over another and, as I looked down at him, he opened one eye and looked up at me. I shot him with my Luger, shouting to the platoon, “they’re alive!” It was quickly over, and all the enemy lay dead.’
2
Yet still the UN Command could not bring itself to recognise the simple truth – that the Chinese had entered the Korean War in force.
Bradley, in Washington, speculated uncertainly as to whether Peking was merely seeking to make a face-saving gesture in support of its defeated North Korean allies. There was renewed debate about the merits of bombing the Yalu bridges. On 13 November, the State Department sought opinions from London, Canberra, Ottawa, Delhi, Wellington, Moscow and the Hague about possible overflights of Manchuria by UN aircraft in ‘hot pursuit’. US ambassadors in each capital reported that reaction to such an initiative would be highly unfavourable. CIA reports continued to give uncertain guidance: on 8 November, the Agency estimated that there were 30–40,000 Chinese already in Korea, with 700,000 more poised across the border in Manchuria. The reports suggested that Peking considered itself to possess full freedom of action, and might move in strength. But Washington remained obsessed with the belief that the communist world acted in concert, to a prearranged plan; that Peking would not or could not operate independently of Moscow, and that the evident unwillingness of Moscow to see the war extended would preclude Chinese action. Bedell Smith, the CIA’s director, urged the National Security Council on 9 November that MacArthur should be given a freer hand in North Korea, because ‘the Kremlin’s basic decision for or against war would hardly be influenced by this local provocation in this area.’
3
At a joint State–Defense meeting on 21 November, Vandenburg and Forrest urged that, if MacArthur’s advance to the Yalu was
checked by the Chinese, Peking should be told to ‘quit, or we would have to hit them in Manchuria’.
4
No evidence of dissent from this view by Marshall or any others present is recorded. Washington interpreted Chinese warnings and probes in October as evidence of weakness and reluctance to fight. The Administration’s instinct was to call the Chinese bluff. Although Washington had some reason to be exasperated by MacArthur’s public declarations and threats, the private mood in the capital, the confidence in imminent victory and lack of apprehension about Chinese intentions, mirrored that in Tokyo.
And if the American assessment of Peking subsequently proved bitterly mistaken, the circumstantial evidence indeed supports the view that the Chinese moved with caution and circumspection into Korea, and committed themselves to all-out war only when it became apparent, first, that the UN forces were not entirely formidable foes; and second, that unless they were defeated on the battlefield, they were committed to an advance to the Yalu. Some of the Chinese soldiers who took part in the first actions against the ROKs and 1st Cavalry described how afterwards they were marched back across the Yalu, and moved eastward to cross the river into North Korea once more, for the main offensive that followed. For an army as scantily provided with transport as that of China, this was scarcely an economical approach to deployment. It can be most readily explained by a measure of caution and indecision in Peking, as the Chinese leadership measured the military capability of the UN forces. In November 1950, General MacArthur thundered to the United Nations that the Chinese intervention was ‘one of the most offensive acts of international lawlessness in historical record’. This was absurd. The Chinese had been given much to alarm them. It may never be possible to piece together the precise decision-making process in Peking that led to the order to enter Korea. Almost all the key participants are dead, and among the living there is no reliable body of records to make it possible to establish the objective truth about recent Chinese political history. But the evidence is overwhelming that in 1950,
Mao Tse Tung and his colleagues were deeply reluctant to engage the United Nations – or, more precisely, the forces of the United States – in Korea.
China had scarcely begun to recover from her civil war. In 1949, an estimated forty million of her population were affected by natural disasters. To famine was added the new problem of local guerrilla war: the traditional phrase ‘kung fei’ – ‘communist bandits’ – was now transferred to the Kuomintang. Over a million were rounded up or killed between May 1949 and May 1951, most of them south of the Yangtse. In the country, secret societies had grown up to resist land reform. There was widespread dissent in the cities. China was still seeking to secure what she considered to be her own borders. In October 1950, the People’s Liberation Army moved into Tibet, and completed its occupation of the country only the following year. Meanwhile in the east, Peking’s attentions were overwhelmingly focused upon eliminating Formosa as the base of Nationalist opposition. Throughout the summer of 1950, invasion barges were being built, some 5,000 junks assembled, airfields prepared to support the assault on Chiang’s stronghold, which the 3rd Field Army’s deputy commander, Su Yu, declared would be ‘an extremely big problem, and will involve the biggest campaign in the history of modern Chinese warfare’. Yet amidst all this, Mao had been seeking to demobilise vast masses of his unwieldy army, to return soldiers to the factories and fields and workshops where they were so badly needed. It was a problem that Peking had failed to resolve by the autumn of 1950, when China still possessed some five million men under arms.
Peking must have been well aware of Kim Il Sung’s invasion plans – the railway system of north-east China played an important part in moving Soviet supplies and equipment into North Korea. But there is no evidence that China played a significant role in the North Korean decision to go to war. The Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, signed in Moscow on 15 February 1950, went some way to heal the longstanding rift between Mao and Stalin. But it provided China with disappointingly little material assistance. It
was reported that Stalin had demanded, and Mao rejected, the wholesale appointment of Soviet advisers as a condition of major equipment aid. The People’s Liberation Army was still equipped entirely with arms captured from the Japanese, or supplied by the Americans to the Kuomintang. Despite considerable skill in fieldcraft, it lacked the communications or the training to operate cohesively much beyond regimental level. The PLA remained, in large measure, a guerrilla army, lacking the advantage of the heavy weapons – and the handicap of the impedimenta – of a modern Western army. Both for reasons of domestic political stability and military preparedness, in the autumn of 1950 it appears that many key figures among China’s leadership were most reluctant to see their country exposed to war with the West, with all the uncertainties this entailed.
But Washington’s linkage of the invasion of South Korea with the threat to Formosa in June 1950 had an immediate influence on China. Truman’s statement on 27 June, declaring that ‘the occupation of Formosa by communist forces would be a direct threat to the security of the Pacific area and to US forces performing their lawful and necessary functions in that area’, created – incidentally and almost casually – an entirely new and firm commitment to keeping Formosa out of the hands of Peking’s communist rulers. This was a much greater blow to China’s perceived national interest than Washington seemed to recognise at the time. Premier Chou En Lai adopted a far tougher public attitude towards the American blockade of the Taiwan Strait than towards American intervention in Korea. Henceforward, as a leading historian of the PLA has written, ‘the struggle to liberate Taiwan began to be linked to the struggle against US imperialism as such, and the achievement of the former was now seen in the more long-term context of the latter.’
5
After years in which Chiang Kai Shek had been considered the foremost enemy of communist China, with astonishing rapidity the United States took on this role. ‘The American imperialists fondly hope that their armed aggression against Taiwan will prevent us from liberating it,’ Kuo Mo-Jo wrote in the
People’s Daily
in August. ‘Around China in particular, their designs for a blockade are taking shape in the pattern of a stretched-out snake. Starting from South Korea, it stretches to Japan, the Ryuku Islands, Taiwan and the Philippines and then turns up at Vietnam.’
6
Westerners, and Americans in particular, sometimes made the mistake of allowing their scorn for propagandist rhetoric such as this to blind them to the very real Chinese fear of encirclement. Throughout the Korean War, Washington persistently sought the communist ideological logic behind Chinese actions. It might have been more profitable to consider instead historic Chinese nationalist logic. Korea had provided the springboard for the Japanese invasion of Manchuria only a generation before. As the Americans drove north after smashing Kim Il Sung’s armies in September 1950, Peking was appalled by the imminent prospect of an American imperialist army on the Yalu.
Chinese alarm was intensified by the visibly strengthening relationship between the United States and Chiang. The warm words spoken by both sides during MacArthur’s July visit to Formosa were widely publicised, as were Chiang’s offers of Nationalist troops to fight alongside the United Nations in Korea. The communists would have been even more disturbed had they known how close Truman came to accepting Chiang’s offer of 33,000 men, when MacArthur’s armies were desperate for reinforcements.
In late September and early October, the Chinese issued increasingly forceful warnings, both in public statements and in private remarks to the Indian Ambassador in Peking, about their attitude to the American presence in North Korea. In the first weeks of fighting in Korea, the Chinese press scarcely reported the war. Yet now, a growing crescendo of anti-American propaganda was printed and broadcast: ‘Resist America, Aid Korea’; ‘Preserve Our Homes, Defend the Nation’. Mass meetings denounced the ‘bloodstained bandits’, ‘murderers’, ‘savages’. The People’s Republic did not intend, General Nieh Jung-Chen, China’s acting Chief of Staff, told Sardar K. Pannikkar, ‘to sit back with folded hands and let the Americans come to their border . . . We know what we are
in for, but at all costs American aggression has got to be stopped. The Americans can bomb us, they can destroy our industries, but they cannot defeat us on land.’ On the danger of American nuclear reaction, Nieh said: ‘We have calculated all that . . . They may even drop atom bombs on us. What then? They may kill a few million people. Without sacrifice, a nation’s independence cannot be upheld . . . After all, China lives on the farms. What can atom bombs do there?’
7
At the State Department in Washington, a handful of officials took heed, and sounded a note of caution. John Paton Davies warned that a combination of ‘irredentism, expansionism, Soviet pressure and inducements, strategic anxieties, ideological zeal, domestic pressures and emotional anti-Americanism’ might lead China to intervene. Edmund Chubb, director of the Office of Chinese Affairs, expressed the conviction that China would fight. But his persistent pessimism on this issue had undermined his credibility. As late as 12 October, the CIA argued that ‘despite statements by Chou En Lai, troop movements to Manchuria, and propaganda charges of atrocities and border violations, there are no convincing indications of an actual Chinese Communist intention to resort to full-scale intervention in Korea.’ Dean Acheson found the logic against Chinese intervention irresistible: they would lose all hope of their coveted UN seat; they would need to become clients of the Russians, dependent upon Moscow for air and naval support to be able to wage war at all; the PLA was too poorly equipped to compete convincingly with MacArthur’s armies; the Chinese government must be daunted by the expectation of devastating American reprisals if Chinese forces were committed against those of the UN. The United States was convinced that its policies in the Far East presented no threat to any legitimate Chinese interest. Washington therefore persuaded itself that Peking would reach the same conclusion.
Peking did not. On 2 October, Premier Chou En Lai summoned Pannikkar, the Indian Ambassador, and directly informed him that if the United Nations crossed the 38th Parallel, China would
intervene in the war. Truman, when he learned of Chou’s message, dismissed it as ‘a bald attempt to blackmail the UN . . . The problem that arose in connection with these reports was that Mr Pannikkar had in the past played the game of the Chinese communists fairly regularly, so that his statement could not be taken as that of an impartial observer.’ The absence of any direct link between Washington and Peking was a significant force in preventing the Americans from achieving even the tenuous level of understanding they possessed with Moscow. The lack of diplomatic relations, together with the absolute ignorance of the Peking regime about how these might profitably be conducted, ensured that Washington never received the sort of signals from Peking which, if believed, could have averted a confrontation on the battlefield. On 8 October, the day after American troops crossed the 38th Parallel, Mao issued the order for ‘Chinese People’s Volunteers’ to ‘resist the attacks of United States imperialism’.