The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War Read online

  If he had been somewhat shaken initially by the Chinese attack, now, as they seemed to have vanished, MacArthur became more confident again. General Walton Walker, the commander of the U.S. Eighth Army, whose troops had been hit at Unsan, had cabled back to Tokyo after the attack, “AN AMBUSH AND SURPRISE ATTACK BY FRESH WELL ORGANIZED AND WELL TRAINED UNITS, SOME OF WHICH WERE CHINESE COMMUNIST FORCES.” Blunter than that you could not get. The candor of Walker’s message did not please MacArthur’s headquarters. The general wanted Walker to minimize the danger of the contact with the Chinese and to continue to push north—business as usual. MacArthur soon came down even harder on Walker, who was increasingly nervous about moving north and who, like the Chiefs back in Washington, had wanted to settle for a line at the narrow neck of the peninsula. Why, MacArthur asked Walker, who already feared he was going to be relieved, had the Eighth Army broken off contact with the enemy after Unsan and retreated behind the Chongchon River—pushed, as he said, by a few Chinese “volunteers”? Clearly Walker was to drive forward and continue north, the pressure on him to go ever faster mounting as the Chinese hid and waited.

  On November 6 MacArthur issued a communiqué in Tokyo saying that the Korean War had been brought to a practical end by the way he had closed the trap north of Pyongyang. Not everyone else was that confident. Many of the senior officers in the Eighth Army, aware of what had happened at Unsan, sensed that it had only been a brief flashing of China’s potential.

  Now more than ever there was plenty of reason for the people back in Washington to be nervous. As Lieutenant General Matthew B. Ridgway noted later, when the Chinese had first struck, MacArthur had seen it as a calamity and had sent a message to Washington protesting any limitations on bombing the bridges over the Yalu. The ability of the Chinese to cross those bridges, he said, “threatens the ultimate destruction of the forces under my command.” When the JCS responded to that message by pointing out that the Chinese intervention seemed, in Ridgway’s words, “to be an accomplished fact,” which would surely mean a painful reevaluation of all UN movements north, MacArthur sent another message, which seemed in stark contrast to his previous one and in effect told Washington not to worry, that the Air Force could protect his men, and his forces would be able to destroy any enemy in their way. The drive north would continue. It was the ultimate fateful moment of the Korean War: torn between his great dream of conquering all of Korea and the danger to his troops from a formidable new enemy, MacArthur chose to pursue his dream and to put his army at risk.

  IN WASHINGTON, THE senior players remained frozen. Control of the war, Dean Acheson, the secretary of state, later wrote, had passed first to the Chinese, then to MacArthur—and it now appeared that Washington had no influence at all on the former and marginal influence on the latter. “And what was General MacArthur up to in the amazing military maneuver that was unfolding before our eyes?” Acheson later wrote. That moment was critical: extremely able troops from a brand-new enemy had shown up on the battlefield, fought well, and then had seemingly “vanished from the earth.” “The most elementary caution,” he added, “would seem to warn that they might, indeed probably would, reappear as suddenly and harmfully as they had before.”

  At Sudong, on the other side of the peninsula, the Marines who were part of Tenth Corps had been hit very hard in a parallel battle on November 2–4 and had lost 44 men killed and 162 wounded. They decided that the attack against them had been carefully calculated, as if the Chinese were baiting a trap for them and could not wait for them to push farther north and thus step ever deeper into it. The evidence of Sudong made the developments at Unsan all the more serious and less isolated. This was the last chance to break off the drive north, move back, and avoid a larger war with the Chinese. But Washington did nothing. “We sat around,” Acheson noted in his memoir, “like paralyzed rabbits while MacArthur carried out this nightmare.”

  Part Two

  Bleak Days: The In Min Gun Drives South

  2

  LESS THAN FIVE months earlier, around June 15, 1950, some six North Korean divisions had moved very quietly into place just above the border with South Korea, joining several units already stationed there. Their training was intensified, but a blackout was placed on all radio transmissions. Quietly and covertly, engineers were put to work reinforcing a number of simple bridges on the main arteries heading south, strengthening them just enough so that they could support the heavy Russian-made T-34 tanks. At the same time, Communist workers were feverishly fixing train tracks, which the North Koreans themselves had disassembled when the country was divided at the end of World War II, on lines that ran on a north-south axis. On the evening of the twenty-fourth, the rains began, and continued into the early morning, as some ninety thousand men, more than seven infantry divisions, and one armored brigade of the North Korean People’s Army, or In Min Gun as it was known, crossed the thirty-eighth parallel and headed south. It was an extremely well-planned, multipronged attack. The North Koreans used the main highways, such as they were, and the rail systems to expedite their drive, and in many instances they moved so quickly and successfully that they looped around stunned ROK units before anyone realized what had happened. After the first day, one of their Soviet advisers had offered them the ultimate compliment: they had moved even faster than Russian troops.

  From the time he was first installed in Pyongyang by the Soviets in 1945, Kim Il Sung, the North Korean leader, had been obsessed with the need to attack the South and unite Korea. He was single-minded on the subject, constantly bringing it up with the one man who could give him permission, the Russian dictator Joseph Stalin. He wanted, he told Stalin in a meeting in late 1949, “to touch the South with the point of a bayonet.”

  The pressure on Stalin from Kim had increased dramatically as Mao Zedong came closer to unifying all of China under his revolutionary banner. Mao’s successes seemed to heighten Kim’s frustrations. Here was Mao about to become a formidable new player on the world stage, and yet Kim was frozen in place in Pyongyang, unable to send his troops south without Soviet permission. He was the incomplete dictator, the man who ruled only half a country. So he pushed and pushed with Stalin. What he was selling was simple and seemingly easy: a Communist assault against the South and an easy victory. Kim believed that if he struck with a blitzkrieg-like armored assault, the people of the South would rise up to welcome his troops and the war would effectively be over in a few days.

  In the past Stalin had always been cautious in response to Kim’s entreaties. The Americans were still in the South, even if only in an advisory capacity, and Stalin remained wary of directly challenging them. Still, Kim, who believed his own propaganda and was contemptuous of Syngman Rhee’s American-supported government in the South, proved relentless. He was the most dangerous kind of man, a true believer, absolutely convinced of his own truths. If the Soviets just got out of the way and let him head south, he could conquer the region in virtually no time, he believed, just as Syngman Rhee was convinced that if only the Americans, with their own odious restraints, would get out of his way, he could easily conquer the North.

  Stalin was not unhappy with a certain level of simmering military tension between the two Koreas, nothing too large, but enough to keep each other off balance. On occasion he had encouraged Kim to continue hitting Rhee’s regime. “How is it going, Comrade Kim?” he asked at one meeting in the spring of 1949. The Southerners, Kim complained, were making things difficult. There were lots of clashes along the border. “What are you talking about?” Stalin asked him. “Are you short of arms? You must strike the Southerners in the teeth.” He pondered that for a moment, before adding, “Strike them, strike them.”

  But permission for an invasion was another matter entirely. The Soviet leader was in no rush for an open conflict there. Then a number of exterior developments changed Stalin’s attitude, not the least of them the speech Secretary of State Dean Acheson gave on January 12 at the National Press Club in Washington, which seemed to
signal that Korea was not part of America’s Asian defense perimeter and which in Moscow was read as implying that the Americans might stay out of any conflict in Korea. The speech was a miscalculation of considerable importance on the part of one of the most tough-minded foreign policy figures of the era, because it so critically affected judgments on the Communist side. With China having fallen to the Communists, Acheson was trying to explain what American policy in Asia was, and he had ended up giving a very dangerous signal to the Communist world. “I’m afraid Dean really blew it on that one,” his old friend Averell Harriman said years later.

  In late 1949 and early 1950, Kim apparently made a number of secret trips to Moscow to push for permission, all the while building up his army. The Russians were in those months taking their own cool look at the stakes involved if Kim went south, and they would finally decide that the Americans would not come in. Mao, meeting with Kim, at Stalin’s request, on the question of what the Americans might do, also agreed that the Americans were unlikely to enter the war to save “such a small territory.” Therefore there appeared to be little need for Chinese help. But if the Japanese, still much feared regionally, were ever to enter the war, Mao promised men and materiel.

  Events in China also influenced Stalin in his Korean decision. After all, the Americans had not intervened militarily to save their great ally, the Chinese Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, to whom they had seemed so heavily committed, when all of mainland China had seemed at stake. If Mao’s war—which had gained so much from peasant support—had been so successful, wouldn’t the South Korean peasants support Kim in much the same manner? Wasn’t there a precedent here? So gradually Kim’s plan began to gain support in Moscow. When Mao met with Stalin for the first time in Moscow in late 1949, they had discussed Kim’s war plan. Stalin suggested transferring some fourteen thousand soldiers of Korean nationality then serving in the Chinese Communist Army back to the North Koreans, and Mao agreed. The request, wrote the historians Sergei Goncharov, John Lewis, and Litai Xue in their groundbreaking study, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War, showed “that Stalin was thereby backing the Korean enterprise but distancing himself from any direct involvement.” Stalin was playing a delicate game, flashing a half-green, half-amber light on the invasion. But since it was still uncertain that everything would go as well as Kim prophesized, he wanted no part of the consequences of a more difficult, costly adventure; nor did he want his fingerprints directly on it.

  Mao’s final victory in the civil war in October 1949 only intensified Kim’s hunger. Now he felt it was his turn. In January 1950, at a luncheon held for a new North Korean ambassador on his way to an assignment in Beijing, Kim again made his pitch to several senior political figures from the Soviet embassy. “Now that China was finishing its liberation,” he told them, “it is the turn of the liberation of the Korean people in the South.” He could not sleep at night, he added, so fiercely was he struggling to solve the question of how to unify his country. Then Kim pulled aside General Terenti Shtykov, the de facto Russian ruler of North Korea, and asked him to arrange another meeting with Stalin, and afterward with Mao. On January 30, 1950, eighteen days after the Acheson speech, Stalin cabled Shtykov to tell Kim, “I am ready to help in this matter.” Shtykov in turn passed the news to Kim, who said he was absolutely delighted.

  In April 1950, Kim visited Moscow determined to end Stalin’s remaining doubts. He was accompanied by Pak Hon Yong, a Southern Communist leader, who promised the Soviet dictator that the Southerners would rise up en masse “at the first signal from the North.” (Eventually Pak paid dearly for his optimism and for an uprising that never took place. Some three years after the end of the war, he was quietly taken out and executed.) Over a fifteen-day period, from April 10 to April 25, Kim and Pak met three times with Stalin. Kim was completely confident of victory. He was, after all, surrounded by people who told him how popular he was and how unpopular Rhee was, and how the people of the South longed for him to invade—just as Rhee was surrounded by people who assured him the reverse was true. But both regimes had been in power for five years, and the Southerners, no matter what their grievances against Rhee, also knew a good deal about the oppressiveness of the Pyongyang regime. That was something Kim did not think about, for he was a true believer as a Communist and did not think of his regime as oppressive. He was convinced that the new Korea rising up in the North was a just, truly democratic country.

  Nor would the United States intervene, he assured Stalin, because the Americans would not want to risk a major war with Russia and China. As for Mao, the Chinese leader had always supported the liberation of all Korea and had even offered Chinese troops, though Kim was sure he would not need them. At that point, Stalin said he was on Kim’s side but would not be able to help him very much because he had other priorities—especially in Europe. If the Americans came in, Kim should not expect the Russians to send troops: “If you should get kicked in the teeth I shall not lift a finger. You have to ask Mao for all the help.” It was Kim’s job, Stalin said, to turn to Mao, who had a “good understanding of Oriental matters,” for more tangible backing.

  It was a classic Stalin move. He had withdrawn his opposition, minimized his own contribution, and passed the buck to a new Communist government, one that had barely taken power but was beholden to him. He knew he had considerable leverage over Mao, who wanted to make his own country whole but was blocked by the Americans on Taiwan, and thus would need Soviet help if he was to move against the last Nationalist redoubt. In fact Mao had already been busy negotiating with the Soviets on his need for the requisite air and sea power. Kim met Mao in a secret session in Beijing on May 13, 1950. His audacity, indeed what the Chinese saw as his brashness, surprised the Chinese leader somewhat. The next day Mao received a cable from Stalin confirming his limited support for Kim’s invasion. With that, Mao pledged his own support and asked whether Kim wanted the Chinese to send troops to the Korean border just in case the Americans came in. Kim insisted that there was no need for that. Indeed, he had answered “arrogantly,” Mao later told Shi Zhe, his interpreter. The Chinese were more than a little irritated with him and above all his manner. They had thought that he would come to them more modestly—a Korean, a representative of a lesser country dealing with the rulers of mighty China, men who had just won their own great war—and they would be the senior partner dealing generously with a junior partner. Instead he had treated them, they believed, with disrespect, as if he were merely going through a formality as promised to Stalin. He clearly wanted as little in the way of Chinese fingerprints on his great adventure as possible. Kim was confident that it would be over so quickly—in under a month—that the Americans would be unable to deploy their troops, even if they wanted to. Mao suggested that because the Americans were already propping up the Rhee regime, and Japan was critical to American policy in northern Asia, an American entrance should not be entirely ruled out. But Kim had been unmoved by the suggestion. As for aid, he was going to get enough from the Soviets. That appeared to be true; Russian heavy weaponry was already passing through the supply pipeline to Pyongyang. (On the eve of battle, Kim’s forces would be far better equipped, not only than those of Rhee, but than most units in the Chinese Communist Army, still using older weapons captured from the Japanese and the Chinese Nationalists.)

  Mao had suggested that Kim fight what the writer Shen Zhihua called “a quick, decisive war,” outflanking the cities, not letting his forces be caught up in urban warfare, striking instead against Rhee’s military strong points. Speed was of the essence. If the Americans entered the war, Mao pledged fatefully, the Chinese would send troops. But the Koreans did not think they would need them. When the meeting with Mao was over, Kim told the Soviet ambassador to China, N. V. Roshchin, in Mao’s presence, that Kim and Mao were in complete agreement on his forthcoming offensive. That was not exactly true, and Mao was not pleased that this overconfident, younger man, with his limited record of military success, w
as treating him in such a high-handed manner and professed to speak for him.

  In those early days, Korea remained very much a Soviet satellite, with the Russians making a deliberate effort to minimize the influence of the Chinese. Kim’s top advisers as D-day approached were all Russian generals, and they gradually took over the war planning. They considered Kim’s early plans for the invasion amateurish, and the plans were redrawn to their specifications. The pro-Chinese members of the Korean politburo and military were carefully excluded from the more sensitive planning sessions. Some of the heavier weaponry then being moved into the country was sent by sea rather than rail so that it would not have to go through Chinese territory. It was obvious that both the Koreans and the Russians wanted to minimize the Chinese role. Kim had suggested that the invasion begin sometime in mid-to late June, before the rainy season hit in full force. Stalin eventually agreed to a date in late June. The last massive shipment of Soviet military gear arrived earlier that month. The closer the North Koreans came to the day of the offensive, the more the Russian hand showed. Kim did not even bother to inform the Chinese authorities that an invasion had begun until June 27, two days after his troops crossed the thirty-eighth parallel. Until then, the Chinese were dependent for news on radio reports. When Kim finally spoke with the Chinese ambassador, he insisted that the South Koreans had attacked first, which the Chinese knew to be a considerable lie. What was interesting about all the positioning in the weeks before the start of the invasion was that even as the forecast was for an easy victory, the tensions and the rivalries between the three nations were very serious, with deep historical roots—and the levels of mutual trust were surprisingly thin.