12 » THE STONY ROAD
1. Towards Stalemate
While the British 29 Brigade stood on the Imjin, Van Fleet hastened to create a reserve position north of Seoul – the ‘No Name’ Line – where Eighth Army had no difficulty holding the communists, the momentum of their offensive spent. Yet the Chinese continued to reinforce failure. On 15 May, Marshal Peng launched a new assault with twenty-one Chinese and nine North Korean divisions. Once again, the ROK III Corps collapsed, as it had done with monotonous regularity throughout the war. The communists pushed forward as much as thirty miles in some places. The ROK 5th and 7th divisions gave way. But on the right, the ROK I Corps held its ground. Despite sustaining some nine hundred casualties, the US 2nd Division also stood firm. One of its batteries fired more than 12,000 rounds of 105mm ammunition in a single twenty-four-hour period. The 38th Infantry stemmed repeated attacks on the night of 16 May. ‘Artillery, crashing into the ground forward of the lines, took a terrific toll of the attackers,’ recorded the divisional history, ‘while other hundreds died in the minefields checkered with barbed wire. The groans of the wounded, screams of the attackers and the blast of bugles mingled with the clattering roar of battle as waves of Chinese pushed against the lines . . . Searchlights were turned on to illuminate the battle area and aid the defenders in locating and slaughtering the onrushing Chinese.’
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The divisional commander, Major-General Clark Ruffner, played a prominent front-line role in organising the defence and concentrating his
units for counter-attacks, surviving a helicopter crash as he flew between positions.
The US 3rd Division and the 187th Airborne RCT plugged the gap on the right of the 2nd Division opened by the ROK collapse. By 20 May, the Chinese offensive was spent, and the UN was estimating that it had cost the communists 90,000 casualties. Even if this figure was exaggerated, like so many ‘guesstimates’ on the battlefield, there was no doubt that the enemy had been decisively worsted. The US Army, above all the 2nd ‘Indianhead’ Division, had displayed heartening determination in holding the line. On 22 May, Van Fleet opened his own counter-offensive, designed to exploit the exhaustion of the Chinese. The ROK I Corps moved up the coast against negligible opposition and gained the town of Kansong. The 187th RCT and 1st Marine Division reached the Hwachon reservoir. On the left, I Corps regained the old Imjin line, including the positions from which the British 29 Brigade had withdrawn in April.
There was little doubt that, had the political will existed, the communist front now lay open. The morale of the Chinese armies in Korea was shattered. After all their exhilarating successes of the winter, they were now compelled to confront the new face of the UN armies, the careful deployment of men and firepower which the communists could no longer break through. But Washington and its allies possessed no inclination to press the crumbling enemy northwards, to extend the UN front and put at risk all that had been gained. The objective declared by the Joint Chiefs was to bring about ‘an end to the fighting, and a return to the status quo; the mission of Eighth Army was to inflict enough attrition on the foe to induce him to settle on these terms.’ In the words of a British gunner officer, ‘everybody could see that we had reached stalemate, unless someone started chucking atom bombs.’
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Ridgway wrote: ‘We stopped on what I believe to be the strongest line on our immediate front.’
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In the first half of June, Van Fleet mounted limited operations to consolidate his positions – an exact repeat of the movement Ridgway began in April, but
found frustrated by the Chinese spring offensive. This time, Operation PILEDRIVER successfully gained Chorwon and Kumhwa, the base line of the ‘Iron Triangle’. X Corps cleared ‘the Punchbowl’, another important communist fortified zone. On the new front, give or take a few miles at various points, the United Nations would hold its ground for the remainder of the war.
The Chinese were compelled to concede stalemate. At vast cost in lives, they had demonstrated their inability to break through the revitalised divisions of Eighth Army, whatever local gains they could still achieve against the vulnerable ROKs. However limited the war aims of the Chinese in November 1950, there is no doubt that their early triumphs opened up, in the eyes of Peking, illusory visions of absolute military victory in Korea, of an all-embracing communist success. Now, once again, the prospect for Mao Tse Tung had narrowed dramatically. Chinese hopes of unifying Korea had died. The economic cost of the war to China was proving crippling, with the Russians insisting upon payment for the arms and ammunition which they supplied to Marshal Peng’s army. The West had convincingly demonstrated its determination to defend South Korea, at whatever cost in lives and treasure. Yet, from a Western perspective, the war had thus far proved an unhappy and divisive experience. America’s relationship with her allies had been deeply strained by the behaviour of MacArthur, the real fears in Europe that American desperation might provoke the use of nuclear weapons and even a third world war, in defence of another ‘far-away country of which we know little’. As a leading political historian of the period has written, ‘alarm that Britain might be dragged into war sharpened anti-Americanism, always latent in the Labour Party, and as a study of the Press shows, soon began to undermine confidence in American leadership.’
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Many Westerners in Korea, above all many Europeans, were dismayed by the brutal injustice and corruption of Syngman Rhee’s government, which they were being asked to uphold, and of which more will be said below. ‘We felt a great hatred of being there, of the country,’ said Captain St Clair Tisdall of the 8th Hussars. ‘We seemed to be doing
nothing very useful.’
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The costs of rearmament, above all for Britain, were proving almost insupportable. Even the modest British contingent in Korea was a very serious financial burden.
On 1 June 1951, the UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie declared his conviction that if a ceasefire could be achieved roughly along the 38th Parallel, the resolutions of the Security Council would have been fulfilled. The next day, Dean Acheson made a speech in which he reaffirmed the objective of a free and independent Korea; but he spoke of the prospects for peace resting upon the defeat of communist aggression, and the creation of suitable guarantees to prevent a repetition of that aggression. On 7 June, he told a US Senate committee that UN forces in Korea would accept an armistice on the 38th Parallel. The world was learning to live with an acknowledgement of changed military and political realities in Asia. On 23 June, when Yakov Malik, the Soviet delegate to the United Nations, proposed a ceasefire in Korea, his olive branch was received with overwhelming relief in the Western world. The Peking
People’s Daily
endorsed the Russian initiative. At last, the end seemed in sight. Some compromise could be agreed, and the armies could go home. ‘I . . . believe,’ Ridgway had concluded a report to the Joint Chiefs on 20 May, ‘that for the next sixty days the United States government should be able to count with reasonable assurance upon a military situation offering optimum advantage in support of its diplomatic negotiations.’ On 10 July, communist and UN delegations met for the first time in the town of Kaesong to open ceasefire negotiations. It was fortunate for the peace of mind of the governments of the West that they had no inkling of the two years of struggle and bloodshed that still lay ahead. The communists were about to teach the world yet another bitter lesson in Korea: that war can be waged as doggedly and painfully at a negotiating table as with arms upon the battlefield.
2. Panmunjom
From the outset, Ridgway urged upon his government the toughest possible posture towards the communists in negotiations: ‘To sit down with these men and deal with them as representatives of an enlightened and civilised people,’ he wrote to Washington, ‘is to deride one’s own dignity and to invite the disaster their treachery will bring upon us.’
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If the UN Commander’s remarks would have been considered embarrassingly bellicose, had they been known to some of America’s allies, they were bleakly justified by the events that began to unfold at Kaesong.
At the front, on the first day of talks with the communists sixteen men of the UN forces were killed, sixty-four wounded, fifteen missing. In Seoul, Western correspondents provoked a near-riot in Seoul because of the UN Command’s initial refusal to allow them to attend the truce meetings. Ridgway himself had to leave his headquarters to pacify them. Floyd Park, the Pentagon’s Chief of Information, issued a defensive statement:
Arranging for an armistice during the progress of actual fighting is one of the most delicate negotiations in human affairs and must necessarily be conducted in strictest secrecy. Moreover, ultimate success must depend in some measure upon the willingness of the public to await concrete results, and especially to refrain from violent reaction to incomplete or unfounded reports and rumours.
Yet within weeks, all these sensible considerations would be buried without trace, as the peace talks began their rapid deterioration into a public circus.
The UN Command perceived no special import in the communists’ proposed choice of a site for talks until these began on 10 July.
The UNC delegation was led by Vice-Admiral Turner Joy of the US Navy, the communist group by the North Korean General Nam Il. The significance of the fact that Kaesong was firmly in communist hands became rapidly apparent: the Chinese and North Koreans were not seeking the give-and-take of armistice negotiations. They had come to receive the UN’s capitulation, or at least to score a major propaganda triumph. It had been agreed that the UN party should fly to the talks under a white flag which the Westerners regarded as an emblem of truce. They quickly discovered that the communists were presenting this symbol to the world as a token of surrender. Joy’s delegation found that across the conference table, they had been seated in lower chairs than their communist counterparts. Every speech from the North Korean and Chinese team was punctuated with propaganda phrases about ‘the murderer Rhee’, ‘your puppet on Formosa’. Every exchange was delayed by interminable adjournments demanded by Nam IP’s delegation. Every procedural detail, the most basic discussion of an agenda, was dragged down into a morass of ideological rhetoric and empty irrationality. One of the most urgent UN demands, for the Red Cross to have access to prisoners in communist hands, was unhesitatingly brushed aside. A low point in negotiations was attained on 10 August, when the two delegations stared across the table at each other in complete silence for two hours and eleven minutes, a communist gesture intended to display their rejection of the preceding UN statement. An extraordinary catalogue of ludicrous, indeed often fantastic complaints was presented against the UN Command.
By 22 August, the talks had got nowhere. The communist delegation had wrung every conceivable propaganda advantage from the meetings, while talking for long enough to see that the UN delegation had not the slightest intention of yielding on acceptable terms. Nam Il therefore broke off the talks, claiming that UN forces had attempted to murder his delegation by air attack.
The communists had gained an immensely useful breathing space. Ridgway’s forces had passively held their own positions
during the five weeks of talks, and the Chinese were able to reinforce their own formations strongly with artillery. The UN battle for its next important objective, the Hwachon reservoir which provided both water and electricity for Seoul, proved bitter and costly. The names of Heartbreak Ridge and Bloody Ridge, dominating the reservoir, entered the unlovely vocabulary of the campaign. These features changed hands again and again between August and October. But on 14 October they fell to the US 2nd Division for the last time. Meanwhile, further west, UN forces advanced up to nineteen miles north of the 38th Parallel. Chinese casualties were enormous. There was little doubt that the tide of war had turned once more against the communists. On 7 October, they proposed a resumption of negotiations. This time, there seemed little doubt that the military pressure was forcing them to parley in earnest.
Talks began once more on 25 October 1951, at the genuinely neutral site of Panmunjom, in the no-man’s-land between the armies. On 12 November, Van Fleet, Eighth Army’s commander, was ordered to desist from major offensive action and restrict his forces to the defence of their existing front, to be known as the MLR – Main Line of Resistance. Local attacks were still permissible, but no operation in greater than battalion strength could be mounted without authorisation from Ridgway. This was the prelude to a striking negotiating bid by the UN delegation at Panmunjom: if the communists signed an armistice within thirty days, Joy’s group told the Chinese and North Koreans, the existing front could be frozen into the final demarcation line between the two sides.
This was a move designed to show the communists, and the world, that the UN had no interest in further territorial gains in Korea. It was also intended, of course, to hasten Peking and Pyongyang towards the rapid ending of a war of which Western opinion was becoming increasingly weary. The communist negotiators hastened to ratify the proposal on 27 November. Then, for thirty days, they talked empty nothings at Panmunjom. And while they talked, immune from major UN military action, on the mountains
their armies dug. Day by day, yard by yard, they sunk their trenches and tunnels into the hillsides. For 155 miles from coast to coast of Korea, through December 1951, they created a front of defensive positions almost impregnable to artillery fire and assault, manned by 855,000 men. Successive lines were interwoven into a fortified belt from fifteen to twenty-five miles in depth. By 27 December, when it was amply apparent at Panmunjom that the communist delegation had merely been playing for time, their armies were dug into the positions that, with only minor variations, would form the final armistice line nineteen months later. The communists could feel entirely satisfied with their progress. They were well aware of the growing war-weariness with Korea among the Western democracies. Granted that they had been compelled to forgo the immediate prospect of a military takeover of South Korea, they could hold their existing positions confident that it was most unlikely that the governments providing the UN contingents would tolerate the casualties that would be necessary to break the Chinese line. Peking and Pyongyang, facing the real risk of complete defeat in June 1951, had now achieved a virtual no-lose position. They could settle down at Panmunjom with a sense of time on their side, to wear down the fragile patience of the democracies, with only occasional injections of offensive action at the front, to keep up the drain of casualties and maintain pressure on the UN.