Part III
Hasty arrangements in the Far East at the end of World War II left Korea divided into two states, a communist-dominated North Korea and a nationalist South Korea, both vying for political control of the peninsula. The Korean War began in June 1950 with a surprise attack by the North Korean army across the 38th parallel into South Korea. The United States entered the war as the North Koreans rapidly moved south and overran most of the peninsula. General MacArthur regained much of this lost ground after a stunning military success at Inchon that cut off the North Korean army below the 38th parallel.
The Truman administration and MacArthur failed to define a realistic strategic architecture at the post-Inchon conference on Wake Island for terminating the war. Despite intelligence warnings of intervention by communist forces of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), President Truman accepted MacArthur’s confident assurance that he could march victoriously into Pyongyang and north to the Yalu River virtually unopposed. Instead, PRC forces poured across the border into Korea to reinforce the North Korean army. A bloody attrition war lasted another two and a half years and ended where it began, along the 38th parallel (map III.1). The United States never succeeded in designing a strategic architecture in Korea that led to an outcome Americans wanted to celebrate.
Map III.1. North Korea’s invasion of South Korea forced the UN Command into a retreat to defend the pocket around Pusan until General MacArthur’s Inchon counteroffensive changed the balance of forces—temporarily.
Source: USMA Atlases.
The idea that the United States could deter conflict because it had evolved into the only nuclear superpower would prove illusory, as was the decision to demobilize and reduce the size of the US Armed Forces, given the global scope of the international policies of the Truman administration. The US Army in May 1945 was at the peak of its wartime strength: 8,290,000 men. By the summer of 1950, massive demobilization after the German and Japanese surrenders reduced its rostered strength to 7 percent, or 592,000.1 As described by Max Hastings, “The nation’s armed forces had not merely been reduced—they had been allowed to crumble to the brink of collapse.”2
Policy
The Korean War presented a new strategic context for warfare after 1945.3 No longer could major combatant states define their war aims as the total defeat of an opponent. American possession of atomic weapons and Russian acquisition of nuclear status in 1949 made comprehensive warfare prohibitively dangerous. The Korean War was the first example of a limited war after 1945.
When the war erupted, no American leader was considering reunification of North and South Korea as the geopolitical goal. Indeed, throughout the summer and fall of 1950, American policy makers and military leaders in Washington were indecisive about whether the purpose of the war was to unify the North and South or to preserve the integrity of South Korea. The Truman administration did not explicitly answer this question for six months. Battlefield events forced the answer in December 1950 when the United States abandoned its goal of achieving a total military victory and accepted the reality of having to fight a limited war. In the summer of 1950, President Truman tentatively defined it as a “police action,” but the military response lacked a clear policy definition on what a police action entailed.
American involvement in another shooting conflict so soon after winning a global war was an enormous shock to the American public. The Truman administration, mindful of the appeasement policies of the 1930s, reacted swiftly. The White House authorized MacArthur to commit units drawn from the Occupation Army in Japan, ordered a naval blockade of the entire Korean coast, and committed the US Air Force in the Far East against the communists.
The historical chain of events leading up to the Korean War reached back more than half a century. Korea had been part of the Empire of Japan since 1910.4 When the Japanese surrendered in 1945, Japanese power in Manchuria and Korea collapsed. The Red Army’s invasion of Manchuria on August 9, 1945, opened the door for Soviet troops to penetrate into northern Korea. The path was also open in southern Korea to American forces, whose original mission had been to invade the Japanese home islands. The Allied occupation of the Korean Peninsula after World War II was more by circumstance than by any strategic design. The Yalta and Potsdam Conferences in 1945 only briefly addressed Korea. The Allies at the end of World War II were improvising in real time. Don Oberdorfer describes how two American army officers during an all-night meeting late on August 10, 1945, in the Executive Office Building next to the White House hurriedly established the 38th parallel as the division between North and South Korea.
Around midnight, two young officers were sent into an adjoining room to carve out a U.S. occupation zone in Korea, lest the Soviets occupy the entire peninsula and move quickly toward Japan. Lieutenant Colonel Dean Rusk . . . and [Colonel] Charles Bonesteel . . . had little preparation for the task. Working in haste and under great pressure, and using a National Geographic map for reference, they proposed that U.S. troops occupy the area south of the 38th parallel . . . and that Soviet troops occupy the area north of the parallel.5
Bruce Cumings’s account of the Korean War usefully pointed out much history unknown to Americans in 1950, indeed even to the present day, about Korea and what he calls “the unknown war.”6 American historical and cultural ignorance of Korea in 1945 as troops were landed for the postwar occupation in the South reverberated adversely for the next five years.
Japanese ambitions to colonize Korea coincided with Japan’s rise as the first modern Asian power. Japan instigated a war with Qing China in 1894 and defeated it a year later. A decade of imperial rivalry over Korea ensued, culminating with the Japanese defeat of tsarist Russia. In 1904 the Japanese moved a large army into Korea, historically not for the first time.
Centuries before, Japan had invaded Korea in the late sixteenth century. Shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a samurai warrior and dictator, attempted twice to conquer Korea and China. In 1592, he led an invasion force of 150,000 men that landed at the southern ports of Pusan and Tadaejin. The operational profile of the conflict has striking historical parallels to 1950. Two Japanese divisions quickly overran the defending Korean forces and captured Seoul and then Pyongyang, driving the remnants of the Korean army north across the Yalu River into China. In 1593, regular and guerrilla Korean and Chinese forces recrossed the Yalu, retook Pyongyang, and drove the Japanese south to Pusan. In 1597, after a five-year truce, Hideyoshi invaded again with a force of 140,000. This time the Koreans and Chinese stopped his advance south of Seoul. Both conflicts were fought over the same rugged terrain and battlegrounds that General MacArthur’s UN forces would encounter almost 360 years later.7
Korea became a Japanese protectorate in 1905 and a colony in 1910. Although Japanese education, language, roads, railways, and sanitation were introduced, none of these improvements gained the slightest gratitude from the fiercely nationalistic Koreans. Korean independence was dead for thirty-five years. Despite indigenous resistance, the Japanese maintained their rule in Korea until 1945, leaving a deep Japanese-Korean enmity that lasts to the present day.
The Americans were pragmatic in their own policies as occupiers of Korea in 1945. They could rely on only one local stabilizing force, the Japanese, who skillfully made themselves indispensable to the American military governor, Lieutenant General John R. Hodge, and his men. One of Hodge’s first acts was to confirm Japanese colonial officials in their positions. Japanese remained the principal language of communication. Japanese soldiers and police retained responsibility for the maintenance of law and order. Although General MacArthur directed Hodge to remove Japanese from office, many held on to their influence for weeks as unofficial advisors. These acts of cooperation, even camaraderie, between Japanese and American officers were not lost on the Koreans. According to Hastings, “the senior officers of 24th Corps possessed no training or expertise of any kind for exercising civilian government—they were merely professional military men, obliged to improvise as they went along.”8
General Hodge shipped seventy thousand Japanese colonial civil servants and six hundred thousand Japanese soldiers back to Japan. But the damage to American relations with the Koreans was already done. Many of the replacements chosen for the former Japanese positions were Korean collaborators detested by their fellow countrymen. In the political competition that developed, Syngman Rhee became the principal beneficiary.
Syngman Rhee, seventy-five years old in 1950, was the first among his Korean countrymen to receive Ivy League advanced degrees (a Harvard MA and a Princeton PhD). He had been imprisoned early in the century for political activities (1899–1904); then, except for a brief return visit in 1910, he spent thirty-five years living in the United States, where he lobbied relentlessly for American support for Korean independence, financed by Korean compatriots. He possessed one great advantage from his long absence abroad. He was untainted by collaboration with the Japanese who had colonized Korea in 1910.
To the Americans, “Rhee was a comfortingly comprehensible figure: fluent in the small talk of democracy, able to converse about America and American institutions with easy familiarity, and above all, at home in the English language.” This “acerbic, prickly, uncompromising . . . obsessive, ruthless nationalist and anti-communist seemed a plausible father figure for the new Korea.”9 Bony, venerable, and elderly, Rhee had returned to Seoul in 1945 with the assistance of General MacArthur and General Hodge. Rhee positioned himself to dominate the political process. Rhee’s right-wing, anticommunist party gained popularity and with three other groups gained an effective majority in South Korea’s new constitutional assembly in the 1948 elections. Rhee and his supporters instituted a presidential system of government, and he was inaugurated president in July 1948.
Korean War historians frequently cite Secretary of State Dean G. Acheson’s speech to the National Press Club on January 12, 1950, as one of the proximate causative actions in the chain of events that precipitated the Korean War. In the speech, Acheson left South Korea out of the defensive perimeter that defined American vital interests in the Far East. Robert Leckie calls it Acheson’s “famous speech excluding Korea—and Formosa—from the American defense line in the Far East.”10
Hastings held Acheson “largely to blame for sending misleading signals to Pyongyang and Moscow which made the communists believe they could attack with impunity.”11 David Halberstam in the second sentence of his book referred to Acheson’s “colossal gaffe” because he “neglected to include South Korea in America’s Asian defensive perimeter.”12 Cumings challenged this historical consensus:
Acheson’s Press Club speech was the opposite of an ill-considered gaffe: instead it unlocks key aspects of U.S. policy toward Korea before the war. Why did he not include Korea in his perimeter? The best answer is that Acheson “wanted to keep secret the American commitment to Korea’s defense.” Acheson implied that should an attack come there, the United States would take the problem to the U.N. Security Council—which is what Dean Rusk [assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs] had secretly recommended to him nearly a year before the war, in July 1949, and exactly what Acheson did when the war erupted. In the many drafts leading up to this speech, South Korea was consistently seen as a direct American responsibility, along with Japan. But Acheson did not want to say this publicly, lest Syngman Rhee be emboldened to start a war; that is also why he blocked tanks and an air force for the ROK.13
Cumings pointed out that “Stalin, thanks to Kim Philby14 and other spies . . . was reading Acheson’s secrets with his breakfast and had no reason to pay attention to speeches for public consumption.”15 Cumings’s views are regarded as revisionist, but on the issue of Acheson’s speech being one of the proximate causes of the Korean War, his historical homework is thorough and illuminating.
Kim Il Sung had been installed as the communist leader of North Korea by the Soviets in 1945. For the next five years, he repeatedly asked Stalin for permission to attack the South. His entreaties intensified in 1949 and early 1950 after Mao Tse Tung’s success in China. Kim made a number of secret trips to Moscow to push for permission. John L. Gaddis described Stalin’s “green light” to Kim as part of a larger strategy for seizing opportunities in East Asia and Southeast Asia, building on the momentum of Mao’s 1949 victory over Chiang Kai Shek’s Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) in China, Chiang’s retreat to Formosa, Mao’s creation of the PRC, and Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary Viet Minh initiatives in Indochina.16
Cumings explained Kim’s motives for launching the invasion in 1950. Kim Il Sung had an “impeccable pedigree in the resistance” against the Japanese occupation. So did his family. His father, middle brother, and an uncle were jailed during the 1920s and 1930s for anti-Japanese activities; the father and brother died as a result. Kim took an early leading role in the Sino-Korean guerrilla campaign to resist the Japanese occupation. He organized the first Korean guerrilla unit in 1932, made a name for himself at the Battle of Dongning in 1933, and later assumed a leading role in forging Sino-Korean cooperation in the Manchurian guerrilla struggle. He was fluent in Chinese. Cumings characterized him as “the Manchurian candidate.”17
Cumings’s history identified how much has been left out of the American geopolitical narrative. There had been a civil struggle going on since the Japanese colonization. In all but name, it became a civil war by 1932 and has never ended. The Americans’ demarcation of the 38th parallel and their pragmatic occupation methods infuriated Kim. He always thought he had been on the right side of history—a capable Marxist guerrilla leader of peasant revolts, a fervent anticolonialist, and an ardent enemy of the Japanese. He had paid his ideological dues and wanted a unified Korean communist state. The Americans had denied him this lifelong goal and conspired against him by installing Rhee in the South. All of these events and frustrations were conflated in Kim’s mind as outrages. By 1950 he really wanted to get even, but he needed, and finally got, Stalin’s green light.
Strategy
President Truman had appointed General MacArthur on V-J Day, August 15, 1945, as the supreme commander of the Allied powers (SCAP), responsible for the postwar occupation of Japan.18 Five years later he became “triple hatted” as commander in chief of the United Nations Command (CINCUNC) in addition to already being commander of the US Army Forces, Far East (USAFFE).
American order-of-battle data in June 1950 showed that the two combatant armies were at equivalent strength. However, the numbers did not account for the superior training and battle experience of the Korean People’s Army (KPA), particularly among those large contingents that were veterans of the Chinese civil war fought before, during, and after World War II.19 North Korea also had Soviet T-34 tanks, arguably the best medium tank in World War II for its weight, survivability, maneuverability, speed, and armament. The North also had a small but useful air force of fighters and light bombers.20 The Americans provided World War II surplus equipment to the South Koreans but denied them armor, antitank weapons, and artillery heavier than 105 mm.
Early on the morning of June 25, 1950, North Korea, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), invaded South Korea, the Republic of Korea (ROK), sweeping aside the poorly equipped South Korean army. The invasion began at 0400 with a devastating artillery and mortar barrage. A skillfully prepared deception plan so masked the North’s attack that it achieved complete strategic and tactical surprise. The Korean War had begun and would run for more than three years.
General MacArthur flew to Korea on June 29, 1950, to personally evaluate the situation. Hastings describes MacArthur’s visit as “characteristic.” His Lockheed Constellation, christened the Bataan, was bounced by a North Korean fighter that was driven off by escorting P-51 Mustangs and landed safety. For eight hours MacArthur toured the rear areas of the battlefields. He saw the long columns of terror-stricken refugees pouring south with large numbers of ROK soldiers among them. He saw artillery and mortar smoke and gazed upon the distant buildings of Seoul already in KPA hands. “He later declared that it was there, at that moment, that he conceived the notion of a great amphibious landing [at Inchon] behind the enemy flank.”21 Then he drove back to the Bataan and flew back to his Dai Ichi headquarters in Tokyo.22
MacArthur immediately reported to the army chief of staff, General J. Lawton Collins, that South Korea could only be restored by the commitment of US Armed Forces, including ground units. He urged the Truman administration to make a military commitment on the most powerful possible scale.
I have today inspected the South Korea battle area from Suwon to the Han River. My purpose was to reconnoiter at first hand the conditions as they exist and to determine the most effective way to further support our mission. . . . Organized and equipped as a light force for maintenance of interior order [the South Korean Army was] unprepared for attack by armor and air. Conversely, they are incapable of gaining the initiative over such a force as that embodied in the North Korean Army. . . .
If authorized, it is my intention to immediately move a United States Regimental Combat Team to the reinforcement of the vital area discussed and to provide for a possible build-up to a two-division strength from the troops in Japan for an early counteroffensive. Unless provision is made for the full utilization of the Army-Navy-Air team in this shattered area, our mission will be needlessly costly in life, money and prestige. At worst it might even be doomed to failure.23
Secretary of State Acheson moved even faster than MacArthur. On the night of the invasion, he took the issue of North Korean aggression to the United Nations. Over the next forty-eight hours, Acheson drove American decision making. At White House emergency meetings, he argued for an immediate increase in military aid to the ROK, US Air Force cover for the evacuation of American civilians in South Korea, and the interposition of the US Navy’s 7th Fleet between Taiwan and the PRC mainland. Cumings flatly asserts that the decision to intervene militarily was Acheson’s decision, supported by President Truman, but taken before UN, Pentagon, or congressional approval. Acheson’s geopolitical reasoning focused on American prestige and credibility and had little to do directly with any perception of Korea’s intrinsic strategic value.
Within two days, the UN Security Council passed two resolutions condemning North Korea’s aggression, Resolution 82 on June 25, passed by a vote of 9–0, and Resolution 83 on June 27 calling for an immediate cessation of hostilities and recommending that the UN members “furnish such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to repel the armed attack and to restore international peace and security in the area.”24 The vote on Resolution 83 was unanimous in favor. Ironically, the USSR was not present to veto either of these resolutions, as the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, Yakov A. Malik, had been ordered by Stalin to boycott the Security Council because the United Nations refused to admit the PRC to its membership in January 1950. This accident of history, the Soviet boycott of the Security Council, enabled the UN vote to send troops to Korea. Korea was the first conflict where an international organization voted to intervene between two warring parties, not just with peacekeeping resolutions and token forces, but also with unequivocal military support. General MacArthur was appointed commander in chief of the United Nations Command on July 10, 1950.
The Truman administration during the first year of the war conducted an energetic diplomatic campaign to broaden the participation of UN member military forces. If the concept of the Korean War was to be perceived as a credible act of collective security rather than as a narrow pursuit of American national interest, the member states of the UN had to be seen as contributors on the battlefield. Twenty-two countries dispatched forces to the Korean War, with the United States and the ROK providing the most.25
Operations
The North Koreans launched the invasion with a coordinated plan that ran coast to coast. The KPA had assembled seven infantry divisions supported by an armored brigade equipped with the T-34 because the ROK lacked antitank weaponry and armor. Half of the enemy assault forces were arrayed in a forty-mile arc around the Uijongbu Corridor, an ancient invasion route that led directly to Seoul fifteen miles to the south.26 Terrain and natural obstacles hindered the advance more than the ROK forces. Four ROK divisions defended the area north of Seoul, but the surprise of the attack and the shock of enemy armor overwhelmed their defenses. The front just north of Seoul began collapsing at once. Battalions and companies retreated in broken, undisciplined streams and abandoned their equipment, desperate to keep ahead of the advancing KPA units. The KPA was clearly superior to the ROK Army in several critical dimensions. The KPA possessed 150 Russian T-34 tanks; the South Koreans had no tanks. The KPA had superior artillery outclassing the South Koreans by a ratio of three to one. The North Koreans had a small tactical air force; the South Koreans had none. One-third of the KPA attacking force consisted of Korean veterans of the Chinese communist forces that “gave it a combat-hardened quality and efficiency that it would not otherwise have had.”27
Kim’s KPA divisions were threatening Seoul within two days. The failure of the four ROK divisions to hold the key line of communication along the Uijongbu Corridor north of Seoul ensured the quick loss of the capital. South Korean units panicked, mutinied, or fled before the oncoming KPA forces. The capital fell two days later, with the KPA destroying 60 percent of the ROK Army in the process. Rhee left the city the following day, June 27, 1950. That left the surviving ROK units north of Seoul engaging a well-equipped, well-trained enemy without communications or organized logistical support. ROK soldiers simply melted into the general population of South Korean refugees streaming south. The KPA’s capture of Seoul by the next day caused the Han River bridges to be prematurely destroyed on June 28,28 killing hundreds of soldiers and civilians who were crossing them at the time.29 Retreating ROK divisions were trapped north of the Han and lost a large number of fighting personnel and all of their equipment and supplies.30 Thus began a steady retreat of the ROK Army south, ending with American intervention in force and the desperate defense of the Pusan Perimeter.
American forces conducted a fighting retreat from Seoul down the peninsula; then they consolidated with the ROK Army and fought to defend the Pusan Perimeter. MacArthur’s successful landing at Inchon in the fall changed the balance of forces until his overconfidence in rushing north to the Yalu led to the entry of the PRC into the conflict by the winter of 1950.
After Inchon, as subsequent chapters will show, the UN Command had an opportunity to restore the territorial integrity of South Korea and end the war without trying to gain complete political control of all of Korea. Western capitals were receiving diplomatic signals indicating that the PRC would intervene if the UN Command attacked into North Korea. MacArthur and his military and political bosses in Washington were so confident of total victory that Secretary Acheson dismissed these signals out of hand as “mere vaporings.”31 MacArthur’s decision to push north had all the earmarks of a front-to-back plan. Because the Truman administration was ambivalent about the political objective of the war, unification versus protection of the integrity of the South, MacArthur’s post-Inchon strategy to cross the 38th parallel lacked clear political or military supervision.
If the Truman administration had prudently defined its strategic architecture for fighting in Korea and fully evaluated the available intelligence at the meeting on Wake Island, it could have clarified what ultimately became the geopolitical goal of the war, the restoration of South Korean sovereignty. Instead, Truman and his national security advisors accepted General MacArthur’s wildly optimistic assessment of the low risk of PRC intervention. As a result, the Korean War evolved into an ugly, nasty war of attrition that ended nearly three years later after much more loss of life by both sides. For many Americans, the outcome did not merit the large sacrifice in lives and consumption of war-fighting matériel. It would take another half century before Americans realized that the “forgotten” or “unknown” war enabled the emergence of a democratic, sovereign state on the Pacific Rim that now enjoys the respect of the world.
General Matthew B. Ridgway, MacArthur’s successor in the UN Command, had a more realistic view of the strategic challenges of limited war. He retrospectively explained that the UN Command lacked the manpower and matériel to attack and hold a permanent military position in North Korea.32
Chapters 12 through 16 reveal why the strategic architecture for a limited war had to be different from the strategic architecture of victory in World War II. They reveal the interactions between policy makers in Washington and commanders in the field and the difficulty of aligning strategy with operations.
The Korean War was a direct conventional confrontation involving American soldiers in combat against hundreds of thousands of communist Chinese, as well as small numbers of Russians.33 It bore many of the characteristics of a World War II theater involving millions of soldiers arrayed along front lines. Allied operations over the fall and winter of 1950–1951 stabilized the fighting along what soon was called the Main Line of Resistance (MLR). The fighting continued for thirty more months, and the war ended when both sides realized that victory was improbable. The MLR in July 1953 metastasized into the demilitarized zone (DMZ) and remains a permanent territorial scar.34