The Korean War (73 page)

Yet the Chinese, who were the most passive partners in the original North Korean invasion of the South, could argue a legitimate determination not to tolerate an American presence on the
Yalu. It was MacArthur’s commitment to sweep north from the 38th Parallel that introduced a new strand of confusion into the debate about the merits of the United Nations operation in Korea. Until that moment, few detached observers around the world could deny that the UN flag was flying in an honourable cause, the restitution of the
status quo
in Korea. But from the moment UN forces crossed the 38th Parallel, the highest ideals of the United Nations became submerged beneath the foreign policy purposes of the United States. MacArthur must not bear sole responsibility for the decision to drive north. Not only in Washington, but in London and other Western capitals, in the flush of victory at Inchon it seemed possible to achieve a cheap, absolute success over the communists. If some statesmen and diplomats possessed reservations, they did not express them very strongly. Their silence, or at least muted expressions of concern, could reasonably be interpreted as consent in Washington and at the Dai Ichi.

MacArthur’s denunciation of the Chinese intervention as a treacherous act will not do. Peking gave repeated warnings of the limits of its patience. It could plead the interests of self-defence in crossing the Yalu with at least as much conviction as President Kennedy a decade later in threatening war if the Soviets placed missile bases in Cuba. The Peking government had only recently emerged victorious from a war against Nationalist armies supplied and supported by the United States. With American sponsorship, the Nationalists could still pose a formidable threat to Mao Tse Tung’s fragile government. Some Americans today, as well as in 1950, would argue that since Mao Tse Tung’s communist regime represented an evil force in the world, it was legitimate for the forces of justice to adopt any means to destabilise, and ultimately to undo it. But most of America’s allies, today as in 1950, find this argument unacceptable. The British, in particular, have always sought accommodation with communist China, and acknowledged the legitimacy of the People’s Republic. This much granted, it was unreasonable to expect the Chinese to stand idly by while the United States deployed an army along the Yalu.

Yet the Chinese, in their turn, displayed strategic naïveté. The testimony of Chinese officers makes clear that they greatly underestimated the power of a Western army. Because they had just defeated an American-sponsored and equipped Nationalist army, Mao Tse Tung and his commanders appear to have expected the same level of performance, and the same weaknesses, in the US Army itself. This view was reinforced by their early experience of fighting Americans in November and December 1950. The Chinese undoubtedly went into Korea with the limited objective of driving back the Americans to a respectable distance from the Yalu. But in December 1950, in the exultation of tactical success, they made a strategic error precisely mirroring that of the Americans a few weeks earlier: they saw an opportunity to expand a limited operation into a crushing and symbolic wider victory. Thus, they drove on southwards in hot pursuit of the fleeing Americans; and thus, with their supply lines over-extended and their resources of everything but manpower almost exhausted, they met the full might of a Western army, regrouped under Ridgway. Throughout the two years that followed, the combatant nations felt themselves engaged in an inescapable struggle for face. Each side having rashly overreached its limited war aims, peace only became attainable after a long process during which the combatants became once more reconciled to these. The war drove China into diplomatic and economic isolation, and made her an absolute dependent of the Soviet Union for a generation. ‘Peking’s action,’ in America’s view, assessed by Dr Rosemary Foot, ‘displayed its revolutionary zeal, inexperience in world affairs, troublemaking capacity in the immediate vicinity of its borders, and exaggerated sense of its own power.’

But if China was denied its ideological triumph in Korea, the war made Mao Tse Tung’s nation a great power in the eyes of the world. The impact of that first crushing Chinese victory in the winter of 1950 was never entirely lost. The spectacle of a heavily armed and armoured Western army fleeing before Marshal Peng’s cotton-clad divisions was not forgotten. Most men who fought
against the Chinese in Korea went home with a considerable regard for their fighting qualities, which made it all the more remarkable that, in Vietnam a decade later, a new generation of Americans proved once more reluctant to believe that Asian soldiers could match Westerners on the battlefield. In Korea, China convinced the world that she was a force to be reckoned with, after centuries in which she had been dismissed as an ineffectual society of mandarins and warlords. The chief negative cost of the war to Peking was that it prevented the communists – perhaps for ever – from gaining control of Formosa, today’s Taiwan. In June 1950, Washington was weary of Chiang Kai Shek and his defeated Nationalists. Had it not been for the North Korean invasion, they would have almost certainly been left mouldering on Formosa until the communists overwhelmed them. Instead, they became a central element in America’s policy for resisting communist expansion in the Far East, the beneficiaries of vast military and economic aid, which made possible the powerful modern industrial state they created over the next thirty years.

Thousands of men who fought for the United Nations in Korea are deeply moved today by the gratitude that South Koreans still display for the salvation of their country from the communists more than thirty years ago. Perhaps this has been enhanced by watching South Vietnam submerged into a communist state. ‘I see Koreans today, and the respect they show for us,’ said Private Bill Norris of the 27th Infantry, ‘and I contrast this with the animosity I saw for us in Europe, after World War II ended. They didn’t want us over there. In Korea, I see gratitude. I never felt exploited by a Korean, in the way we all were as GIs by the French and the Belgians in 1945. In the market place in Seoul, I could buy stuff for the same price a Korean paid for it. I felt safe there.’ Sergeant John Richardson of 2nd Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry believed passionately that the war was worthwhile: ‘In October 1983, I had the great privilege of going back to Korea. It was the thrill of a lifetime. On my return, I simply told the Calgary Branch of the PPCLI Association that I was convinced that our
fallen comrades rest in a country where their sacrifice is fully appreciated.’

‘We stopped communism, didn’t we?’ said Bob Campbell of the 1st Marines. They did indeed. At the 38th Parallel, a border persists today between one of the most advanced, and one of the most backward societies in Asia. The people of North Korea have paid the bitterest price of all for Kim Il Sung’s adventure in June 1950. To this day, they remain the prisoners of the ageing, obsessive, perhaps demented old dictator in his wretched self-created prison camp. Fifteen years after the Chinese set about opening up a new relationship with the West, the North Koreans reject any attempt to do so, and their relations even with Peking are strained. North Korea exists in pitiful isolation, a society dominated by poverty and the cult of Kim Il Sung.

South Korea, meanwhile, has become one of the greatest economic and industrial powers in Asia. The harshest price it has paid for the war is that, even today, it remains a society under siege. The threat from the North has never receded. Pyongyang maintains a constant propaganda war, and a military capability that cannot be ignored. North Korea’s constant efforts to undermine the South by subversive activity, and periodically by guerrilla and terrorist operations across the border, provide the justification for the military machine that still dominates South Korea. Syngman Rhee was deposed in 1960, when the United States publicly withdrew its support from the old dictator after he had rigged one election too many. A generation after his fall, a procession of more or less repressive military, or military-influenced, governments rule from Seoul. Political dissent is ruthlessly suppressed. The United States maintains a strong military presence. Washington has always tacitly accepted the tough domestic policies of South Korea’s governments, maintaining the bastion against communism. Seoul won the warm approval of the US during the Vietnam War, repaying the aid given in 1950 by sending a South Korean division to Indochina which proved one of the most formidable fighting formations in the struggle against the communists. It also earned
a reputation as one of the most savage and ruthless in its dealings with the Vietnamese. Ironically, it was the Vietnam War which gave the Korean economy its decisive boost to take off. South Korea today displays all the traditional qualities of its people: energy, organisation, fiercely nationalistic competitiveness, ruthlessness. Much of the country the UN armies knew has vanished under unlovely steel and concrete.

Such critics as the British left-wing journalist James Cameron regarded all this, as they later regarded the shortcomings of the American-sponsored regime in Vietnam, as sufficient reason to deny the Seoul government a claim to legitimacy. In 1950, Cameron became a popular martyr-figure in the British media, when the proprietor of the weekly magazine
Picture Post
stopped the presses when he found an issue containing a denunciation of the Seoul regime by Cameron. Headed ‘An Appeal to the United Nations’, the article catalogued the brutalities and injustices of the Rhee regime, and argued that it was wrong that this should be defended under the flag of the UN. Cameron later called his piece ‘an implicit criticism of the Americans for their endorsement of an arrogant tyranny’.
⁵
His eloquent reporting foreshadowed the veritable torrent of such prose which would flow from Indochina in the sixties and seventies. It stemmed from the conviction that civilised democracies should withhold their support – above all their military support – from flawed political structures, in which such wickedness flourished. Yet others – the author among them as a correspondent in Vietnam – acknowledged the failings of the Saigon or Seoul regimes, while denying that these provided sufficient reason to concede victory to the communists. The evidence of equal, indeed greater evils wrought by the communist forces could not be gainsaid. Rarely in the world is a choice offered between a cause of absolute virtue, and one of absolute evil: even the Allied cause in the Second World War was confused, for many participants, by discovering the bloody hand of Joseph Stalin on the side of the democracies. In Korea, as in Vietnam, the democracies supported the cause of a flawed society. Yet they were fighting
against opponents representing an even harsher tyranny. Who can doubt that, if Hanoi had been defeated, South Vietnam would today enjoy the same affluence as South Korea, and its people at least a greater measure of freedom than they can look for under communism?

Today, the people of South Korea have achieved a prosperity and fulfilment that gives them immense satisfaction. In 1950,Won Jung Kil was twenty-one, an unemployed welder eking out an existence in Inchon, strongly hostile to the Rhee regime. He was conscripted in 1951 and spent six years of wretched near-starvation as an ROK army driver: ‘I hated the officers. They had too much of everything. Pay? We had no pay, there was just a little food. No Korean enjoyed the war.’ Yet today, Won can say: ‘It was worthwhile. We are fine, we have enough to eat. I like our life now very much.’ The simple, material satisfaction is very deep, for people who have come such a long way in thirty-five years. They look back upon the war as a nightmare for their nation. But they reveal a real gratitude for the campaign waged by the United Nations, that enabled their society to retain its independence, that made possible everything they have today. Few Westerners, looking upon the respective circumstances of North and South Korea today, can doubt that the West’s intervention in 1950 saved the Southerners from a tragic fate, and indeed opened the way to a future for them infinitely better than anything attainable under Kim Il Sung. If the Korean War was a frustrating, profoundly unsatisfactory experience, more than thirty years later it still seems a struggle that the West was right to fight.

Appendix A: Chronology