The phrase passed into the textbooks of American politics, for it set the seal upon Eisenhower’s victorious campaign. Two weeks later, he was elected President of the United States by 33,936,234 votes to 27,314,992. On 29 November 1952, he fulfilled his pledge. Under conditions of deep secrecy, his absence from New York concealed by an elaborate cover plan involving a procession of
distinguished visitors to his empty apartment, Eisenhower flew to Korea.
The President-elect spent three days in the country. He visited a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, and talked to wounded men. He travelled within earshot of artillery fire in the forward area, and inspected some troops. He passed an hour with a bitter and suspicious Syngman Rhee. He spent most of his time in the country with General Mark Clark. He saw General James Van Fleet, commanding the Eighth Army. He gave a press conference at which he conceded the unlikelihood of achieving ‘a positive and definite victory without possibly running the grave risk of enlarging the war’. But he declared that America ‘will see it through’. Then he flew home to New York.
The gesture had been made. That it was no more than a gesture was made evident by the subsequent testimony of Clark and Van Fleet, who had expected to take part in protracted debate about military options, only to discover that Eisenhower’s mind was fixed upon the best means of achieving a truce. The exalted visitor had flown from Seoul to Wake Island, where he joined John Foster Dulles and other prominent advisers for a three-day cruise to Hawaii on the cruiser
Helena.
The world believed that the voyage was spent in intensive debate about Korea. In reality, however, it seems that little of substance was discussed. The new Administration’s objective for Korea was already set: ceasefire. All that remained to be decided was how the communists could be persuaded to accede.
MacArthur was among the foremost to propose a solution. While Eisenhower was still at sea, he announced publicly that he had his own plan for ending the war, when the new President was willing to hear it. On 17 December, the two generals met at Dulles’ home. MacArthur presented Eisenhower with a lengthy memorandum. He argued that the United States should demand from the Soviet Union the unification of Korea – and Germany. Their neutrality would be guaranteed by the two superpowers. Failing Moscow’s agreement,
‘it would be our intention to clear North Korea of enemy forces. This could be accomplished through the atomic bombing of enemy military concentrations and installations in North Korea and the sowing of fields of suitable radio-active materials, the by-product of atomic manufacture, to close major lines of enemy supply and communications leading south from the Yalu, with simultaneous landings on both coasts of Korea.’
It was a sad postscript to a great military career, this spectacle of an aged warrior casting his Jovian thunderbolts into oblivion. ‘General,’ said Eisenhower carefully, ‘this is something of a new thing. I’ll have to look at the understanding between ourselves and our allies, on the prosecution of this war, because if we’re going to bomb bases on the other side of the Yalu, if we’re going to extend the war we have to make sure we’re not offending the whole . . . free world or breaking faith.’ MacArthur went away home empty-handed. A fortnight later, Truman departed from office filled with distaste for both generals, Eisenhower perhaps most of all. Ike, Truman considered, knew better. Ike, who had sought to pretend that inglorious departure from Korea could be avoided, was in reality entirely committed to bringing this about.
The first plank of the new Administration’s Korean policy was a dramatic expansion of the ROK army, to a strength of some 655,000 men, at an estimated cost of $1 billion a year. Thus, it was hoped, the principal military burden of the war could be transferred from the United States to the Korean people. ‘Koreanisation’ possessed precisely the same shortcomings as ‘Vietnamisation’ twenty years later. While the ROK army was a greatly improved fighting force since its lowest ebb in 1950–51, all the evidence on the battlefield continued to suggest that Korean formations were incapable of meeting their Chinese opponents on equal terms. But unlike Vietnamisation, Koreanisation would not be put to a decisive military test. The expansion programme began in the spring of 1953.
A development of much more direct impact upon the Korean peace negotiations was America’s test detonation, in January, of
the first nuclear device of a size capable of adaptation for artillery – a tactical atomic weapon. The Joint Chiefs of Staff recognised its relevance to the Korean stalemate in a study issued on 27 March:
The efficacy of atomic weapons in achieving greater results at less cost of effort in furtherance of US objectives in connection with Korea points to the desirability of re-evaluating the policy which now restricts the use of atomic weapons in the Far East . . .
In view of the extensive implications of developing an effective conventional capability in the Far East, the timely use of atomic weapons should be considered against military targets affecting operations in Korea, and operationally planned as an adjunct to any possible military course of action involving direct action against Communist China and Manchuria.
On 19 May, the Joint Chiefs recommended direct air and naval operations against China and Manchuria, including the use of nuclear weapons. There should be no gradual escalation of force, they argued, but a dramatic surprise attack. The next day, the National Security Council endorsed the JCS recommendation.
Dulles, the Secretary of State, was visiting India. He told her Prime Minister, Nehru, that a warning should be conveyed to Chou En Lai: if peace was not speedily attained at Panmunjom, the United States would begin to bomb north of the Yalu. The Pentagon had recently carried out successful tests of atomic artillery shells. The implication was plain. So too was the significance of Eisenhower’s public announcement that the Seventh Fleet would no longer be committed to preventing military operations between Formosa and the mainland of China. Nationalist guerrillas, armed and trained by the CIA, embarked upon an intensified programme of raids against the mainland, more than two hundred in the first five months of 1953, according to Peking.
It will never be certain how close the United States came to employing nuclear weapons against China in the spring and summer of 1953, or how far the JCS study and the Dulles warning were
intended as bluffs. If such they were, there is no doubt of their success. Through its agents in the United States and Europe, Moscow was undoubtedly informed of American progress on tactical nuclear weapons, and Washington’s change of policy towards active consideration of their use. The Russians feared Dulles, and were disposed to believe that he meant business. There was a new confidence about American policy. In 1950, the uncertainty within the Administration was profoundly influenced by its perception of its own military vulnerability. By 1953, the rearmament programme was well advanced; aircraft production was at a post-war high; the United States felt less afraid of the Russians, more assured of its own ability to confront them. Eisenhower said after his return from Korea: ‘We face an enemy whom we cannot hope to impress by words, however eloquent, but only by deeds – executed under circumstances of our own choosing.’
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At a National Security Council meeting early in February, Dulles spoke of the need to make the idea of nuclear weapons more acceptable. He ‘discussed the moral problem, and the inhibition on the use of the atomic bomb, and Soviet success to date in setting atomic weapons apart from all other weapons as being in a special category. It was his opinion that we should try to break down this distinction.’ At the same meeting, Eisenhower suggested the Kaesong area of North Korea as an appropriate demonstration ground for a tactical nuclear bomb – it ‘provided a good target for this type of weapon’.
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By March, Eisenhower and Dulles were ‘in complete agreement that somehow or other the tabu which surrounds the use of atomic weapons would have to be destroyed’.
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At a special NSC meeting in March, Eisenhower said that although ‘there were not many good tactical targets . . . he felt it would be worth the cost’ if a major victory could be gained in Korea.
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Here, then, is clear evidence that Eisenhower and his senior advisers talked with considerable open-mindedness about the possible use of nuclear weapons in Korea. Yet today, it remains difficult to believe that, had the military situation in Korea remained unchanged, Eisenhower would have authorised their employment.
It is entirely probable that he would have done so, had the Chinese offered some new and dangerous military provocation. But if America had detonated a nuclear weapon in cold blood, at a time of military stalemate on the battlefield, Eisenhower would have faced the certain, bitter, lasting anger and hostility of America’s allies around the world. He was a cautious, humane man. It seems unlikely that he would have taken so drastic a step.
But in the spring of 1953, the Russians and Chinese almost certainly allowed themselves to be persuaded that the new Administration was willing to use nuclear weapons if the United States was denied an honourable escape from Korea. After so many months of deadlock, the talks at Panmunjom suddenly began to move with remarkable speed.
3. The Last Act
For almost two years, it had been apparent that the Korean War could not be settled on any terms that provided for the reunification of the country, nor that dispossessed either client regime in North or South. During the interminable struggle in which each side laboured for face, the fate of the prisoners held at the two extremities of the Korean peninsula remained the dominant issue. The prisoners. It always came back to the prisoners. They were no longer even prisoners-of-war, in any historic sense. Each side’s captives had become hostages, whose treatment and disposal became the focal point of ruthless bargaining in those last, sterile months of the Korean War.
In December 1952, when the Red Cross in Geneva urged the exchange of sick and wounded prisoners in Korea as a ‘gesture for peace’, Mark Clark welcomed the proposal, but the Soviets and Chinese rejected it. Then on 28 March, without warning, Kim Il
Sung and Marshal Peng not only announced their acceptance of the swap, but also declared that this should pave the way to a settlement of the future of all PoWs, and a ceasefire ‘for which people throughout the world are longing’. Chou En Lai endorsed this commitment in a Peking radio broadcast on 30 March. Although he restated Chinese rejection of an exchange which left any Chinese or North Korean prisoner in UN hands, he now proposed that any prisoner whose will was in doubt should be placed in the hands of a neutral state, for further investigation. For the Soviets, on 1 April Foreign Minister Molotov endorsed Chou’s proposal and offered Moscow’s support in seeing it carried out.
Washington at first regarded the Chinese declaration with deep suspicion. Again and again over the past two years, an apparently straightforward proposal from Peking proved, on closer inspection, to be capable of such different interpretation as to be worthless. Yet on 11 April at Panmunjom, the liaison officers at the conference table were astonished to reach rapid agreement with the communists for ‘Operation Little Switch’. 700 Chinese and 5,100 Koreans were to be sent north. 450 Korean and 150 non-Korean soldiers were to come south. Between 20 April and 3 May, the exchange was completed at Panmunjom.
A new wave of revulsion about the communist conduct of war swept the West when its peoples beheld the condition of the UN prisoners who were released: in addition to wounds and disabilities that had effectively gone untreated for months, even years, many men were corroded by prolonged starvation, or psychologically crippled. Yet negotiations for the next exchange began at once, and the full UN and communist delegations met at Panmunjom on 26 April for the first time in six months. The main point at issue was the selection of a neutral ‘quarantine nation’ where prisoners refusing repatriation should be held. The UN opened by proposing Switzerland, with no man to be held in quarantine for more than two months. The Chinese rejected Switzerland, and demanded six months. Pressed for an alternative neutral site, they named Pakistan. Then the communist delegates appeared to undergo a sudden
change of heart. They no longer insisted that the prisoners’ political screening process should take place outside Korea, cut the proposed period from six months to four, and demanded the creation of a Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission made up of Poland, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Sweden and India.
The Americans were at last convinced that the communists genuinely sought peace. Stalin was dead, and in the dark shadows of the Kremlin new forces, albeit no less hostile to the West, were setting policy. Perversely, at this moment Dulles experienced a twinge of doubt about the wisdom of making a Korean peace based upon the
status quo
on the battlefield. Korea was the only shooting war that the United States was conducting with the communists anywhere around the globe. Was she now sacrificing a unique opportunity militarily to humble the enemy before the world? ‘I don’t think we can get much out of a Korean settlement until we have shown – before all Asia – our clear superiority by giving the Chinese one hell of a licking,’ the Secretary of State told Emmet Hughes. But Eisenhower was by now wholly committed to a Korean settlement. Dulles buried his misgivings.
At last, the Americans perceived that they possessed the balance of strength at the negotiating table. It seemed that time was pressing the communists even more urgently than the UN. Mark Clark requested, and received from Washington, permission to drive home the advantage. The bombing campaign of Far East Air Force was intensified, with attacks on dams in North Korea deliberately intended to destroy crops and food supplies. The UN delegation at Panmunjom tabled a new, and declaredly final, proposal: a single neutral power would screen all reluctant PoW repatriates within ninety days, inside Korea. If this proposal was rejected, all unwilling North Korean repatriates would be unilaterally freed inside Korea within a month. The UN air attack on the North would also be intensified.