In the summer of 1950, the forces unleashed by the Cold War and the Chinese Revolution converged on a most unlikely place: Korea. Dubbed the Hermit Kingdom by outsiders, pre-twentieth-century Korea was largely isolated from the outside world. One Western reporter described the peninsula as a “tangled, twisted mass of rugged mountains stubbled with small timber, snow capped in the north, laced with many streams and rivers . . . and in the valleys and up the terraces of the hills the fantastic patterns of the rice paddies, green and golden and yellow, broken now and again by wasteland, red as the clay of Georgia, corrugated like the mountains of the moon.”1 The Japanese seizure of Korea in 1910 replaced this isolation with four decades of brutal colonialism. In 1945, American and Soviet forces occupied the newly liberated peninsula. Neither superpower had ambitious plans for what it believed was a strategically insignificant corner of the world. Tragically, though, the shock of the Chinese Revolution and the rising stakes of the Cold War struggle would dramatically change Korea’s place in world affairs.
Between 1950 and 1953, the peninsula served as the central theater in America’s war against communism in Asia and the first instance of a direct superpower military intervention in the developing world during the Cold War. The Chinese Revolution had awakened both Washington and Moscow to the high stakes of the nascent Cold War in Asia. While Stalin and Mao worked to harness nationalist elements in Korea and the postcolonial world, Truman and his advisors prepared to fortify key bulwarks against what they feared was a broader Communist onslaught. Neither Washington nor Moscow initially saw the peninsula as a vital interest, yet viewed through the lens of the Cold War, Korea came to appear pivotal. The Koreans would fight their ongoing civil war amid the carnage of a superpower intervention and an invasion from the most populous nation in the world.2 Truman’s decision to intervene pulled the United States into the first in a series of wars in the developing world during the post-1945 era. The Korean War effectively militarized America’s containment policy and helped to ensure that the Cold War would be fought on Third World battlefields.
The fighting unleashed perhaps the most intense violence of the post-1945 era, killing more than three million people (equivalent to 10 percent of the peninsula’s population) in the space of three years. Both sides slaughtered civilians by the thousands and committed vicious atrocities. In Korea, two of the world’s Great Powers would clash, and one, the United States, would contemplate the use of atomic weapons for a second time in less than a decade. Tens of thousands of infantry were killed in human-wave attacks, urban and trench warfare, long campaigns, and bloody retreats that stretched up and down the length of the Korean Peninsula. Seoul, seat of the South Korean government, was transformed from a bustling capital to a maze of smoking ruins. Three years of brutal ground combat and aerial bombing wiped dozens of towns and villages off the map.3 Here, at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, Washington mounted its first full-scale intervention to halt the expansion of communism in the developing world.
DIVISION AND CIVIL WAR
No one could have predicted this calamity in the autumn of 1945, when American GIs entered Seoul, a city five and a half centuries old, surrounded by mountains and inhabited by more than a million people. “The autumn air was brisk and clear,” a Western journalist wrote. “Eagles wheeled overhead against white clouds, their shadows crossing palaces and hovels, crumbling temples and Western buildings.” American military vehicles pushed through streets packed with carts, bicycles, and pedestrians while soldiers on leave wandered among a labyrinth of alleyways and side streets.4
Like the war in China, the conflict in Korea predated the Cold War and the involvement of the superpowers. In its inception, the Korean War was a revolution brought on by the collapse of the Japanese Empire. The Japanese had established military control over the Korean Peninsula in 1910 as part of their bid for Pacific empire. For the next four decades, Tokyo ruled over a largely impoverished, undereducated, agrarian society in which the native language was suppressed and millions of peasants became little more than slaves. Inside occupied Korea, nationalists and Communists slowly built their political bases, fighting the Japanese at the same time that they were laying the foundations for what would become a civil war after 1945. The American destruction of the Japanese Empire in World War II brought this colonial rule to an abrupt end, however, and left the Allied powers in control of the peninsula.5
American and Soviet leaders had given little thought to the postwar occupation. Late on the evening of August 14, 1945, the day of the Japanese surrender, two American officials, Dean Rusk and Col. Charles Bonesteel, stepped out of a meeting and into an adjacent room to hastily draw up a proposal for the division of Korea between Soviet and American occupation forces. Lacking extensive knowledge of Korea, they used a map from the magazine National Geographic to bisect the nation in such a way as to leave Seoul under American control. The Thirty-Eighth Parallel, Rusk would recall, “made no sense economically or geographically,” but time was of the essence. Rusk and Bonesteel proposed the plan, and both their superiors and the Soviets accepted. Moscow and Washington each feared the expansion of its rival’s influence in the region, and each was amenable to the concept of a joint trusteeship in what it considered a north Asian backwater.6
But U.S. authorities in the south were not well prepared to begin the complex task of postcolonial state building. Four decades of Japanese rule had left a society on the brink of revolution. As Japanese forces stood down, people’s committees coalesced throughout the peninsula, demanding independence and massive political and economic reforms. The American occupation forces confronted a rapidly changing social landscape: tenants battled against landlords in the countryside while competing political factions jockeyed for power in the cities. Gen. John Hodge, commander of the occupation, described southern Korea as “a powder keg ready to explode.” He judged the greatest threat to come from the possibility of collaboration between the Kremlin and left-wing elements in Korea. Fearful of mounting radicalism, Hodge sidelined Korean nationalists, choosing instead to work with the remnants of the Japanese Army and local collaborators. Further, he began setting up separate administrative and defense apparatuses for the southern half of the country, which left some officials in Washington to worry about the danger of a permanent division that would leave northern Korea under Soviet influence.7
In short order, ad hoc administrative measures became the foundation for the permanent division of Korea between North and South. After their attempts to establish a coalition government in the South composed of moderates and conservatives failed, U.S. officials settled on a pro-Western politician, Syngman Rhee, as the leader of the new regime. The seventy-year-old nationalist had studied at George Washington University, Harvard, and Princeton. An advocate for Korean independence from Japan, Rhee had been active in politics since 1896. With the American victory over Japan, he returned to his homeland eager to play a role in shaping a new, independent Korea. Rhee proved to be no American puppet, however. He worked assiduously to establish support among bankers and landlords, becoming one of the most influential conservative leaders in the country. From this position, he sought to undermine U.S.-Soviet negotiations for the creation of a unified Korea between 1946 and 1947. By attacking the prospect of a broad-based coalition, Rhee helped to force the United States into a position of choosing between a joint Korea led by a left-wing regime or a divided Korea with a conservative government in Seoul. Faced with this proposition, Washington acquiesced to the creation of a South Korean state under Rhee’s leadership, the Republic of Korea (ROK), in 1948.8
While the Americans created a pro-Western regime in the South, Moscow laid the foundations for a Communist system in the North. The man who would rise to leadership in Pyongyang was Kim Il-sung. Although the precise details of Kim’s early life are murky, distorted by both North Korean hagiography and South Korean anticommunist propaganda, the general story is well known. Born in the picturesque village of Mangyongbong outside Pyongyang in 1912, Kim moved with his family to Manchuria in 1920. By 1932, Kim had joined a band of guerrillas operating against Japanese military forces in Manchuria and Korea. While fighting in China, he received a political education in Maoism from his Chinese superior officer, Wei Zhengmin. Kim distinguished himself as a guerrilla commander and earned fame for leading a raid against the Japanese-occupied Korean town of Poch’onbo in June 1937. Kim’s rebels killed a number of Japanese police, destroyed several government buildings, and made off with four thousand yen. His success earned him the distinction of having a bounty placed on his head by Japanese officials. Hunted by the Japanese, Kim and what remained of his guerrillas escaped across the Amur River into the Soviet Union in 1940 or 1941, where he received further training from the Red Army. After the end of World War II, officials in the Soviet occupation placed Kim in power.9
Yet Kim and the party leadership in Pyongyang were not Kremlin puppets. They proved adept at transposing Communist political structures onto Korean culture and society. Kim worked to bring the North Korean peasantry into the party system, mobilize the population, institute radical land reforms, and nationalize heavy industry. In the coming years, the regime would establish an enduring cult of personality behind the person of Kim Il-sung and use the educational system, publishing houses, and film industry to promote a powerful strain of nationalism among the population. Finally, the regime created a large and efficient state security apparatus. The result was a sweeping Communist revolution in the North that proved surprisingly successful at marrying Korean nationalism to a Stalinist political and economic system.10
If the division of Korea between a Communist North and a noncommunist South served superpower interests, it had no basis in Korean history. Indeed, the country had existed as a cohesive cultural entity for centuries. Seoul and Pyongyang were all but destined to contest an artificial boundary bisecting the country. The existence of an active left-wing movement in the South only added fuel to this political discontent over division, pushing the country closer to civil war. As Koreans watched the revolution unfolding just over the border in China, many longed to replicate the process on the peninsula. Conflict would break out even before the official establishment of the Republic of Korea, in the form of guerrilla warfare.
The first major flashpoint of this war appeared in April 1948, when a left-wing uprising broke out on the southwestern island of Cheju. The revolt was led by the people’s committees that had run the Cheju government since 1945. While the American military occupation had marginalized left-wing forces, Seoul’s attempts to reestablish control over the island sparked a rebellion, which Seoul resolved to crush using brutal and overwhelming force. As the counterinsurgency mounted, the interior of the island was designated an enemy zone and government troops began forcing peasants to the coastal regions and burning villages in insurgent areas. U.S. officials noted that Pyongyang radio had cheered the insurgency as “the forerunner of the widespread armed resistance which is destined to sweep the country as soon as American troops have been withdrawn. . . . It is clear from the nature of the propaganda emanating from the Soviet-controlled radio that Cheju Island has been chosen as the spot for a major Soviet effort to sow confusion and terror in southern Korea.”
Soviet agents were infiltrating Cheju on small North Korean fishing boats while Soviet ships and submarines lurked offshore. U.S. officials warned, “Photographs of operations on Cheju indicate unusual sadistic propensities on the part of both Government and guerrilla forces. Signal atrocities have been reported, indicating mass massacre of village populations, including women and children, accompanied by widespread looting and arson. In some cases the Army has been guilty of revenge operations against guerrillas which have brought down vengeance on unarmed villagers.”
Individuals suspected of aiding the revolt faced the threat of government reprisal, torture, and even massacre. By the time government forces gained the upper hand in the spring of 1949, nearly 70 percent of Cheju’s villages had been burned and a third of its population had been forced into government-controlled villages. While official casualty estimates projected just under twenty-eight thousand killed in the uprising, Cheju’s governor told American officials that the actual number was closer to sixty thousand—one out of every five residents.11
As the bloodshed in Cheju neared its peak, another incident seized international headlines and threatened to cut the feet out from under Rhee’s newly formed regime. With South Korean police struggling to put down the insurrection in Cheju, Seoul ordered the army to reinforce the counterinsurgency against Communist rebels inside the country. On October 19, 1948, a mutiny broke out in the Fourteenth Regiment of the South Korean army, which had just received orders to move to Cheju. The mutineers seized the southern city of Yeosu, taking possession of thousands of weapons and executing some five hundred police, soldiers, government officials, and civilians. The uprising then spread to the nearby city of Sunchon, which also fell to the rebel troops. The regime in Seoul responded with decisive action, ordering eleven battalions with some five thousand loyalist troops to surround Yeosu and Sunchon and crush the mutiny. In a week of vicious urban fighting, government troops were able to retake the rebel strongholds, though the counterattack left entire city blocks in ruins. American forces provided support, reconnaissance, resupply, and planning for the government assault. By October 27, the mutiny had been put down. “The city stank of death and was ill with the marks of horror,” one American journalist in Sunchon recalled. Corpses littered the streets, and relatives were unwilling to claim the bodies for fear of facing retribution from ROK police. Meanwhile, long lines of men and boys waited to be interrogated at public buildings. Between twenty-five hundred and five thousand people had been killed in the rebellion.12
The uprisings in Cheju, Yeosu, and Sunchon convinced Rhee that the time had come to dramatically expand his security forces. In November 1948, the regime passed the National Defense Act, authorizing the creation of a one-hundred-thousand-man army and a ten-thousand-man navy. Meanwhile, the size of the South Korean National Police was increased to fifty thousand, twice the size of the Japanese forces that had occupied the entire peninsula. Rhee used these forces to crush the regime’s political opponents and tighten his grip over South Korean society. In December, the regime passed the National Security Law, which gave Rhee the power to use ROK military forces against political dissidents. “Every observer with long experience of Korean affairs,” explained an Australian diplomat, “holds the opinion that we have at present in South Korea a reactionary government closely associated with unscrupulous landlords and bolstered by a vicious police force.” Rhee’s massive security apparatus would not come on the cheap. As the size of Seoul’s forces swelled, the ROK issued some two hundred million dollars in requests for U.S. military assistance. After Washington rebuffed these requests, Seoul began taking out extensive loans from the Bank of Korea and printing more currency. As its ostensible ally in Seoul moved into an increasingly precarious position, the U.S. government was approaching the moment when it would be forced to commit to the ROK or cut its losses.13
Even as Rhee’s forces struggled to put down the insurgency in the South, border clashes raged along the frontier with North Korea, particularly between May and December 1949. Both regimes looked toward the eventual reunification of Korea, and both launched raids across the border. South Korean forces were the aggressors in the majority of these incidents, but they were restrained by U.S. refusals to provide the ROK with the heavy weapons necessary to launch a full-scale invasion of the North. With a goal of deterring a civil war in Korea, U.S. diplomats explained to Rhee that he should not expect Washington to save his regime if he were to provoke a showdown with North Korea. The Soviet Union was similarly reluctant to back a Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) invasion of the South, fearing the larger repercussions of such a clash for the Cold War struggle. Furthermore, with tens of thousands of North Korean troops fighting in the Chinese Civil War, Pyongyang was not in a position to begin a war with the ROK. With the end of the civil war in China, however, the situation began to change.14 In December 1949, CIA officials warned that North Koreans were returning across the border with Manchuria and that the Soviets were preparing an arms shipment to be smuggled into South Korea in mid-January. The report warned that guerrilla activities in South Korea were likely to increase.15
Kim was convinced that the only way to reunify Korea was through military force: “[W]e will be victorious,” he proclaimed, “but victory does not come on its own; victory must be won.” Korea, he argued, must take the Bolshevik Revolution and the recent victory of the CCP in China as models for the struggle against the regime in the South. The failure of the southern uprisings bolstered the argument for large-scale military operations. With this in mind, Kim enlarged the North Korean military and began building an arms industry to supply it. Aiding in this drift toward war was the failure of the North’s 1949 two-year development plan and the feared stagnation of the DPRK economy. Kim was also mindful of domestic rivals (most notably the southern Communist leader Pak Hon-yong), who would reap the greatest gains from a popular uprising in the South: the best way for Kim to ensure his leadership over a reunified Korea was to conquer the South through military force. Furthermore, by mid-1950, North Korea had reached the third stage of Mao’s theory of revolutionary war. Korean Communists had staged guerrilla operations in the South in the preceding years as the DPRK built up its military power north of the Thirty-Eighth Parallel. Limited border clashes had transpired during the period of equilibrium between the two Koreas. By the summer of 1950, North Korea had become strong enough to launch a final offensive designed to topple Rhee and reunify the peninsula.16
Changing attitudes in Moscow also helped convince Kim that the time had come to attack. Prior to 1949, Stalin had been skeptical of the potential for Communist success in East Asia. Much like his American counterparts, he preferred to focus on extending his country’s influence into Europe. Some Soviet officials doubted that North Korean forces were strong enough to win a war against the South. “Even taking into account the help which will be rendered to the northern army by the partisans and the population of South Korea it is impossible to count on a rapid victory,” they noted in mid-September 1949. They warned that
a drawn out war gives the possibility to the Americans to render corresponding aid to Syngman Rhee. After their lack of success in China, the Americans probably will intervene in Korean affairs more decisively than they did in China and, it goes without saying, apply all their strength to save Syngman Rhee. . . . Moreover, a drawn out war in Korea could be used by the Americans for purposes of agitation against the Soviet Union and for further inflaming war hysteria. Therefore, it is inadvisable that the north begin a civil war now.
But Mao’s unexpected triumph in China changed the playing field and led Stalin to ignore these recommendations. In January 1950, Stalin told Mao that he was no longer interested in maintaining his wartime agreements with the Western powers. “To hell with Yalta!” he thundered during the negotiations that would lead to the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship in February. Moscow was prepared to turn its attentions east. The Kremlin would now treat Mao and the CCP as partners and begin to provide substantial amounts of aid to the Viet Minh forces in French Indochina. Furthermore, Stalin decided to increase aid to the regime in Pyongyang and gave Kim Il-sung the go-ahead to prepare for an attack against the South. Heartened by Mao’s victory and the successful test of a Soviet atomic bomb the previous August, Stalin was ready to challenge America’s position in East Asia.17
Stalin also had new reason to doubt Washington’s commitment to Seoul’s defense. Even as Soviet and Chinese leaders met to negotiate the Sino-Soviet Treaty in January 1950, U.S. secretary of state Dean Acheson outlined a vision for U.S. security interests in the Pacific that excluded Korea. “This defensive perimeter,” he told reporters, “runs along the Aleutians to Japan and then goes to the Ryukyus . . . [and] from the Ryukyus to the Philippine Islands.”18 South Korea’s security, he explained, could be provided by the United Nations. That same month, the U.S. Congress voted down a bill that would have provided economic aid for the regime in Seoul. And if Washington’s actions in regard to the Chinese Civil War were any guide, it now seemed unlikely that the Truman administration would intervene to save the ROK. But these signals were misleading. Washington had in fact entered a period of profound insecurity. As American officials surveyed the international scene in 1950, they saw a number of alarming signals: the Soviets had detonated their first atomic weapon in August 1949; weeks later, Mao announced a Communist victory in the world’s most populous nation; the French seemed unable to gain the upper hand in their war against Communist guerrillas in Indochina; and Communist rebels were on the march in the Malaya Peninsula and the Philippines. Making matters worse, President Truman’s domestic opponents in the Republican Party had begun to attack the Democrats for the “loss” of China.19
No document better reflected this atmosphere of heightened insecurity than National Security Council Paper 68 (NSC-68), drafted in April 1950. The report laid out a vision of a polarized international system in which the forces of democracy and capitalism confronted the rising power of an authoritarian state, driven by a “fanatic [Communist] faith” and bent on world domination. The United States, the report insisted, was the only power standing between the Kremlin and its goal of enslaving the world. In its most dire warning, the report argued, “The assault on free institutions is world-wide now, and in the context of the present polarization of power a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere.”20 Using this logic, areas and countries of seemingly little strategic significance could be transformed into vital interests. In a zero-sum game, any victory for communism was a defeat for the forces of freedom and democracy. In practical terms, NSC-68 called for a dramatic expansion of U.S. global commitments in an effort to halt the spread of communism and for a sharp increase in defense spending. Whereas George Kennan’s earlier formulation of containment strategy called for the use of concerted diplomatic pressure to block the spread of Soviet influence, NSC-68 proposed the use of military force, when necessary, in the form of limited war. Washington must be prepared to fight along the front lines of the Cold War around the world. While many areas might not be so vital as to justify the risk of nuclear war, they were still worth defending using more limited means. In short, NSC-68 called for the militarization of Cold War containment policy. But Truman remained skeptical. Although recent months had seen a steady stream of troubling developments in the Cold War, the president was hesitant to commit American resources to the massive undertaking outlined in the report. This was about to change.
THE ATTACK
At 4:00 in the morning on June 25, 1950, as a steady drizzle of rain fell from the predawn sky, some ninety thousand soldiers of the North’s Korean People’s Army (KPA) lurched forward as their artillery opened up on targets in the South. North Korean troops crossed the Thirty-Eighth Parallel at six points along a 150-mile-wide front. South Korean and American troops near the front were caught by surprise. There had been fighting along the border for months, with each side launching raids against the other, but nothing of this scale had yet taken place. Syngman Rhee, the president of South Korea, did not learn of the attack until 6:30 a.m., and he waited ninety minutes before notifying American officials. It took several more hours for the reality of what was happening to sink in: North Korean troops had crossed the border en masse and were rapidly pushing South Korean forces back toward Seoul. Their plan was to launch assaults along the length of the Thirty-Eighth Parallel, with the main assault aimed at sweeping down the Uijongbu Corridor and enveloping the capital. Kim Il-sung, president of North Korea, anticipated the collapse of South Korean forces in one week, the capture of Seoul, and the end of the war. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander of the U.S. occupation forces in Japan, downplayed the severity of the situation. “This is probably only a reconnaissance-in-force,” he announced. “If Washington only will not hobble me, I can handle it with one arm tied behind my back.”21
The initial North Korean assault across the Thirty-Eighth Parallel on June 25 achieved startling success, driving the South Korean defenders south and opening the approaches to the capital. In the coming days, it looked as if Kim’s gamble would pay off and the peninsula would be reunified under Communist control. The residents of Seoul, less than thirty miles from the front, listened anxiously for reports of the fighting and watched ROK soldiers moving north to confront the attackers. On the afternoon of June 26, radios across the city announced a victory for South Korean forces north of Uijongbu. The celebrations ceased by evening, however, as refugees reached the northern stretches of the city and residents began to hear the muted rumble of heavy guns. In the early morning hours of June 27, American officials received orders to evacuate Seoul. Fear swept through the city as the flow of refugees increased and thousands of civilians tried to flee across the Han River bridges. The first North Korean forces reached Seoul around 7:30 p.m. but were held off by the city’s defenders for several hours. The flow of refugees continued through the night and into the next morning. At 2:15 a.m., panicked ROK officials detonated explosives on the bridges, killing around a thousand civilians and South Korean soldiers crossing the river and stranding another 44,000 ROK troops on the northern bank. By the third day of the attack, some 76,000 ROK troops were unaccounted for; South Korean commanders could locate only 22,000 soldiers of their remaining force.22
As increasingly dire reports of the situation in Korea poured into Washington, Truman administration officials moved quickly toward intervention. Convinced that North Korea was a Soviet puppet state, Truman and Acheson feared they were watching the beginning of a general Communist offensive against Western security interests. U.S. forces in Asia would have to prepare for a larger attack. Meanwhile, the president authorized American air strikes against North Korean forces and ordered U.S. troops to defend South Korean airfields and ports. Visiting the front, General MacArthur issued a soberer appraisal, saying that U.S. ground forces would be needed to reverse the DPRK’s offensive. On June 30, Truman agreed to the general’s request to send two of his four divisions from Japan to Korea. “If we let Korea down,” Truman argued, “the Soviet[s] will keep right on going and swallow up one piece of Asia after another. . . . If we were to let Asia go, the Near East would collapse and no telling what would happen in Europe.” In July, Acheson would tell the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the attack had been “an open, clear, direct challenge” to the United States. The Kremlin believed that the United States would not defend South Korea, he concluded, and now hoped to advance on the earlier Communist victory in China. “The attack,” he would write that same month, “makes amply clear centrally directed Communist Imperialism has passed beyond subversion in seeking [to] conquer independent nations and [is] now resorting to armed aggression and war.”23 A State Department intelligence assessment was even more dramatic, warning that the North Korean attack was part of a global Soviet-backed offensive with repercussions for Western interests in Japan, Formosa, Indochina, Burma, and Malaya. It might even be the prelude to “possible Soviet moves in Germany or Iran.” The destruction of “the US ‘salient’ in Korea would deny to the US any area where land forces could be staged for an attack” on the eastern reaches of the USSR or China. Moreover, control over the entire peninsula threatened Tokyo and effectively neutralized “the usefulness of Japan as an American base” in the event of a war in the Far East.24 “To sit by while Korea is overrun by unprovoked armed attack,” warned the U.S. political advisor in Tokyo, “would start [a] disastrous chain of events leading most probably to world war.”25
But American officials overestimated Moscow’s influence over North Korea. As Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev later explained, “the war wasn’t Stalin’s idea, but Kim Il-song’s. Kim was the initiator.” As Stalin would tell Kim, “If you should get kicked in the teeth, I shall not lift a finger. You have to ask Mao for all the help.” The Kremlin, hoping to secure long-term access to warm-water ports, had concluded that the best option lay in supporting Kim’s attempts to reunify the peninsula. A North Korean victory would grant Moscow access to the harbors at Inchon and Pusan and represent another step in the expansion of communism through East Asia. Washington, in any case, had excluded South Korea from its defensive perimeter in the Pacific. Kim’s move was a gamble, but not an unreasonable one.26
While Stalin reluctantly supported Kim, Mao’s role was more complicated. Mao and his comrades had expected a U.S. military intervention in Asia since 1949. U.S. involvement in Korea also gave the CCP an opportunity to further consolidate its hold on mainland China. As Beijing wrote on June 29, 1950, “The United States has . . . exposed its imperialist face, which is not scary at all but is favorable for the further awakening of the Chinese people and the world.”27 At the same time, the American military intervention in Korea represented a dire threat to Beijing. “If the U.S. imperialists win [in Korea],” Mao would warn in August, “they may get so dizzy with success that they may threaten us. We therefore must come to [North] Korea’s aid and intervene in the name of a volunteer army, although we will select the best timing.” Moreover, the chance to confront Washington’s armies on an Asian battlefield also presented a tremendous opportunity to showcase the military might of the PRC. The United States could send as many as forty divisions to Korea, Mao bragged to a Soviet diplomat, but Chinese forces would “grind” them up. He later told Stalin that his goal in Korea was “to spend several years consuming several hundred thousand American lives.” The peninsula could be transformed into an enormous killing field that might tilt the global balance of power in the Cold War. More than just sucking the United States into a bloody quagmire in a war against Mao’s battle-hardened guerrillas, a war between American and Chinese armies in Korea would place substantial pressure on Stalin to send even more support to Beijing.28
Stalin was happy to see the United States engage in what promised to be a bloody intervention in Korea. As he wrote in August 1950, the United States had become “entangled in a military intervention in Korea and is now squandering its military prestige and moral authority. Few honest people can now doubt that America is now acting as an aggressor and tyrant in Korea and that it is not as militarily powerful as it claims to be. In addition, it is clear that the United States of America is presently distracted from Europe in the Far East. Does it not give us an advantage in the global balance of power? It undoubtedly does.”
Moreover, if the United States managed to drag China into the war, it would find itself battling massive armies in hostile terrain. If this happened, Stalin continued, “America would be incapable of a third world war in the near future. Therefore, a third world war would be postponed for an indeterminate period, which would provide the time necessary to strengthen socialism in Europe, not to mention that the struggle between America and China would revolutionize the entire Far East. Does all this not give us an advantage from the perspective of the global balance of power? It unquestionably does.”29
MAO’S ACTIONS ALSO PLAYED INTO STALIN’S HANDS. The Soviet leader approved Kim Il-sung’s plans but gave Mao primary responsibility for protecting North Korea. In doing so, Stalin created a win-win situation for the Kremlin. If the North Koreans won the war, the peninsula would fall under full Communist control. Conversely, if the North Korean offensive bogged down and China intervened, Mao would be forced to turn to Stalin for support, thereby increasing Beijing’s dependence on Moscow. All the while, the United States would be pouring its resources into a vicious war in a region of negligible strategic value. The war in Korea greatly benefited the Soviet geopolitical position.30
The controversy over Soviet and Chinese involvement has led to two basic historical interpretations of the war. The first, embraced by Truman and his advisors, saw the war as an international conflict. The North Korean invasion of South Korea was an act of Communist aggression by one state against another state. The war began with this invasion in 1950 and ended in 1953 with an armistice. The second interpretation, put forward by the Communist states and a number of Western scholars, argued that the Korean War was, at heart, a civil war. The war began in 1945, or even as early as 1932, and had killed some one hundred thousand Koreans by June 1950. The DPRK’s attack in June was not an invasion—for how could Koreans invade Korea? Rather, it was one stage in a larger conflict. Neither Kim nor Rhee accepted the legitimacy of the Thirty-Eighth Parallel as an international boundary, and both were fighting to reunify Korea.31 Both these interpretations have some validity, but it is difficult to dispute the notion that the conflict in Korea began as, and in many respects remains, a civil war. The reality of foreign intervention does not change the underlying nature of the conflict as a war between two competing Korean regimes.
In the end, what ultimately distinguished the war in Korea from the conflict that had just ended in China was the Truman administration’s decision to launch a massive intervention in the war. This would mark the first instance of large-scale superpower intervention in the developing world during the Cold War, and it would dramatically change the course of the East-West conflict. The Truman administration elected to approach the UN Security Council to request international sanction for intervention. The Security Council passed two resolutions on July 25 and 27, which, respectively, demanded that Pyongyang withdraw its forces and called for UN member states to come to the aid of the ROK. American officials were able to take such a commanding role in the Security Council due to the absence of the Soviet ambassador, who had received instructions from Stalin himself not to attend the meeting on Korea. Faced with little opposition, the Truman administration was able to secure the backing of the United Nations for its intervention to save Rhee’s pro-Western regime. The U.S. intervention in Korea would take place, as Gen. Omar Bradley noted, “under the guise of aid to the UN.”32
The scale and speed of Truman’s response to the situation in Korea surprised observers around the world. General MacArthur, commander of the U.S. occupation in Japan, was “amazed” that the president was taking the nation to war in Korea without submitting the matter to Congress, a disturbing precedent for later Cold War conflicts. Stalin, too, was surprised at the American decision to intervene in a country that Washington had chosen to leave outside its security perimeter only months before. Even Mao seems not to have expected Truman to act so quickly. The Truman administration’s fear of a global Communist offensive, of which Korea might represent only the spearhead, led Washington to take drastic and reckless action. Truman led the United States into a war not to defend American lives but to reestablish a Western defensive line at the Thirty-Eighth Parallel. “Harry Truman had ordered troops into action on the far frontier,” one historian later wrote. “This was the kind of war that had bleached the bones of countless legionnaires on the marches of the [British] empire, and had dug the graves of numberless Britons, wherever the sun shone.” With the decision to intervene in Korea, the United States had taken up the mantle of a global power.33
INTERVENTION
General MacArthur, one of the most decorated military leaders in American history, would command UN forces. Son of Arthur MacArthur, an officer in the U.S. Army and a Medal of Honor recipient, Douglas spent his childhood on military bases around the American West. After graduating first in his class at West Point, MacArthur served in the Philippines and Japan and participated in the occupation of Veracruz. During the First World War, MacArthur commanded troops at the Marne and the Argonne Forest, receiving two Croix de Guerre, a silver star, a Distinguished Service Cross, and promotion to brigadier general. After the war, he returned to West Point, where he served as superintendent of the academy and then went on to become the army’s chief of staff. In 1935, MacArthur began his fifth tour in the Pacific, as field marshal of the newly created Philippine Army. With the outbreak of the Second World War, MacArthur returned to the U.S. Army, where he rose to the rank of four-star general and became commander of U.S. troops in the Far East. After being forced to retreat from the Philippines, leaving thousands of American and Filipino troops behind, MacArthur led the campaign that eventually retook control of the eastern Pacific from Japan. By the end of the war, MacArthur had won a Medal of Honor and risen to the rank of five-star general. In 1945 he became the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan, presiding over the occupation of the defeated country. With the outbreak of war in Korea, the general was again called upon to defend American interests, a call he readily accepted.
On July 13, American military leaders in the Pacific met in MacArthur’s occupation headquarters in the imposing Dai Ichi Building in Tokyo. There, MacArthur held court, smoke pouring from his pipe as he laid out his strategic vision for intervention in Korea. He insisted that the United States strike a decisive blow in Korea and, in doing so, smash the Communist offensive around the Pacific Rim. The goal must be to destroy the Korean People’s Army, not simply to restore the Thirty-Eighth Parallel. The North Korean attack was a thinly veiled Soviet move to gain influence in the Far East: Stalin did not want a full-blown war, but he was happy to support Kim’s move on the peninsula. The United States, MacArthur argued, should send two armies to Korea along with all its ships in the Pacific and a large contingent of aircraft. His plan was to “isolate the battlefield” using American warplanes, armed with nuclear weapons if necessary, to cut DPRK forces off from Soviet and Chinese support. Then American troops would stage an amphibious landing at Inchon, flanking North Korean troops. Finally, UN forces from the south would sweep northward while the troops at Inchon would sweep south, crushing the North Koreans caught in between. But Washington must not underestimate North Korean troops. They were fierce fighters who would not be defeated easily.34
Some civilian U.S. officials were hesitant, however, favoring a more measured approach to the crisis. Political leaders in Washington continued to pursue a Europe-first strategy and were reluctant to devote so much manpower to the Pacific theater of the Cold War. If MacArthur’s forces became bogged down in Korea, Western defenses in Europe would languish. Furthermore, the plan for an amphibious landing was risky, and administration officials were understandably reluctant to give MacArthur control of atomic weapons. An angry MacArthur recognized the same line of reasoning that he believed had plagued him in World War II: by saving its troops for Europe, Washington was forcing him to fight with limited forces in the Pacific. This would not be the last disagreement between MacArthur and Truman over the question of limiting the war.35
For the moment, however, the first American troops sent to halt the North Koreans had their hands full. Fresh from their relatively comfortable occupation duties in Japan, the army units that formed the vanguard of the American intervention had been told that they were embarking on a police action that was likely to take only a few weeks. Their commanders hoped that the DPRK would be cowed by the mere presence of American forces—that when the North Koreans discovered they were fighting U.S. forces, they “would turn around and go back.” The American confrontation with KPA forces on July 5, on a highway twenty-two miles south of Seoul, would belie this assumption. Task Force Smith was made up of several hundred soldiers commanded by thirty-four-year-old lieutenant colonel Charles B. Smith. They had no heavy armor and few weapons capable of stopping North Korean tanks. They were, according to MacArthur, “an arrogant display of strength, sent ahead into Korea to give the Communists pause.” The Americans sighted the first tank columns at 7:30 a.m. Forty-six minutes later, American artillery began firing at the oncoming force. As the North Korean T-34 tanks continued, the Americans fired rockets, which failed to penetrate their armor. Although the United States had developed rockets that could pierce the tanks’ armor, these had not been supplied to the troops. The Americans harassed the oncoming columns, but they could not stop them. By early afternoon, Colonel Smith ordered his forces—bloodied, short on ammunition, and overwhelmed by the strength of their opponents—to withdraw.36
The Americans were not prepared for the force they confronted. Far from the ragtag, poorly armed soldiers they had expected to meet, the North Korean army was seasoned, committed, and well equipped. One in three had fought with Mao’s forces in China; now they were fighting to reunify their nation. For many North Korean soldiers, the war had begun as an anticolonial struggle to expel the Japanese, had turned into a war to bring communism to China, and was now focused on destroying a pro-Western puppet regime in Seoul. Unlike their American counterparts, KPA troops had a clear vision of what they were fighting for and were willing to die to achieve it. Now they had U.S. and South Korean forces on their heels.37 North Korean forces employed a variation of Soviet deep-battle tactics: an advance contingent of troops would engage enemy forces in a frontal attack, tying them down while auxiliary units rushed around the enemy’s flanks to attack from the rear. Generally, this amounted to setting up roadblocks and ambushes against enemy columns. These techniques proved devastatingly effective against UN troops, which were usually restricted to moving along roads rather than across Korea’s rugged terrain. Using camouflage and attacking by night to avoid American aircraft, the KPA was able to inflict heavy casualties on UN and ROK forces.38
The opening days witnessed not only the chaos of this retreat but also the brutality that would characterize the conflict. Rhee’s evacuation of Seoul triggered the execution of between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand political prisoners in South Korea—lest they join the ranks of the advancing Communist forces.39 In July, Western journalists reported the massacre of perhaps seven thousand people in a village outside Taejon. Victims were shot or hacked to death with swords before being thrown into six mass graves. On July 2, U.S. Army intelligence reported that South Korean police were rounding up “all Communists and executing them on the outskirts of the city.” CIA sources warned that police appeared to be “executing Communist suspects in Suwon and Taejon, in an effort both to eliminate a potential 5th column and to take revenge for reported northern executions in Seoul.” Prisoners were forced to the edge of earthen ditches and then shot in the head so that their bodies would fall into the waiting graves. Publicly, U.S. officials tried to suppress news of the massacres or shift blame onto Communist forces.40
When American troops working with the ROK air force reported decomposing corpses floating in the water off Jinhae-gu in August, they were told that these were captured Communist spies. “Ammunition was scarce,” a U.S. Air Force colonel remembered; “the spies had been taken out onto water and, with hands bound behind their backs, shoved overboard.” Many U.S. officers were appalled by the ROK’s treatment of prisoners. “They were skeletons,” one American wrote upon seeing a group scheduled for execution, “and they cringed like dogs. They were manacled with chains . . . compelled to crouch in the classical Oriental attitude of subjection.” Moreover, the South Koreans did not try to hide these acts from UN forces: they were taking place in the shadow of U.S. Army headquarters in Pusan and had been “going on for months. Nobody had said a word.”41
In the pandemonium of the early weeks of the war, U.S. forces would also be drawn into the slaughter. On July 26, troops from the U.S. Seventh Cavalry Regiment and hundreds of South Korean refugees met at the village of No Gun Ri, around one hundred miles southeast of Seoul. Both groups, soldiers and civilians, were fleeing the advance of North Korean forces. “We just annihilated them,” remembered one former machine gunner. Fearing the presence of North Korean infiltrators among the refugees, U.S. commanders had issued the following orders: “No refugees to cross the front line. Fire everyone trying to cross lines. Use discretion in case of women and children.” On only their third day at the front, terrified U.S. soldiers from the occupation forces in Japan confronted what they feared might be an attack from Communist guerrillas. As the group of refugees from nearby villages approached U.S. positions, witnesses reported that American warplanes, which may have been suspicious of North Korean guerrillas, began strafing the civilians. The refugees took cover in a culvert beneath a nearby railroad bridge. The Associated Press team that broke the story in 1999 reported that American soldiers “directed refugees into the bridge underpasses—each 80 feet long, 23 feet wide, 30 feet high—and after dark opened fire on them from nearby machine-gun positions.” For the next three nights, U.S. gunners continued to fire on the survivors beneath the bridge. “People pulled dead bodies around them for protection,” remembered one survivor. When North Korean forces took the position, they reported finding four hundred bodies at the site.42
Massacres such as this one were disturbingly common: nearly six years later, South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission would uncover evidence suggesting 1,222 incidents of mass killing during the war.43 As the war swept down, and then back up, the peninsula, it took a horrific toll on the civilians caught in its path. The residents of Cheongwon watched for over a week as a stream of trucks, four in the morning and three in the afternoon, loaded with people slated for execution arrived in the village. Later estimates of those killed at the village reached as high as seven thousand. South Korean soldiers sent to root out Communists near the village of Hampyeong instead attacked a group of peasants. “They told us to light our cigarettes,” one survivor recalled. “Then they began shooting their rifles and machine guns. After a while an officer called out, ‘Any of you who are still alive can stand up and go home now.’ Those who did were shot again.” In the nearby village of Naju, South Korean police hunting suspected Communists disguised themselves as KPA troops and then killed ninety-seven villagers who welcomed them with Communist flags.44 North Korean forces were responsible for their share of massacres as well—which were, not surprisingly, better reported in the American press. In the early weeks of the war, DPRK troops earned a reputation for the summary execution of American and South Korean prisoners. Reports of slain U.S. servicemen, their hands bound, outraged the American public. In a report presented on September 18, General MacArthur drew attention to the DPRK’s brutal treatment of prisoners while lauding the ROK’s treatment of POWs as “perfect.”45
Korean civilians suffered terribly in the first phase of the war. The residents of Seoul watched as North Korean forces seized the city, began throwing up posters of Kim Il-sung and Stalin, and launched a hunt for reactionaries. Many citizens cheered the arrival of the Communist forces and praised the liberation of their city. Others mobbed the roads leading out of the city, fleeing the advancing DPRK armies. Refugees heading south battled starvation in the countryside as they struggled to avoid North Korean troop columns and sporadic attacks from American aircraft hunting for targets in Communist-controlled territory. Tens of thousands of those who made it to refugee camps faced squalid conditions and the threat of smallpox, typhoid, and cholera. An estimated two million refugees would move into UN-controlled territory, straining food stores and medical supplies and adding to the challenges faced by the struggling UN forces.46
By the end of July, American and South Korean troops had been pushed back to only a foothold around Pusan, in the far south of the peninsula. UN forces would have to hold on to the hills along the Nakdong River or be driven from Korea entirely. “There will be no more retreating,” their commander told them. “There are no lines behind which we can retreat. This is not going to be a Dunkirk or Bataan. A retreat to Pusan would result in one of the greatest butcheries in history.” But as the last American troops crossed the river, the North Koreans remained tight on their heels. U.S. forces set up a defensive line on the high ground along the half-mile-wide river and prepared for the North Koreans to attack. The Americans were in a far stronger position than in earlier weeks. Their forces were concentrated behind strong natural defenses, where their superior firepower could be used more effectively against the DPRK. Further, the stabilization of the battlefront allowed American warplanes to be put to greater use attacking North Korean columns moving southward. All the while, men, weapons, and supplies disembarked at the port of Pusan to reinforce UN defenses. By the beginning of August, UN forces on the peninsula outnumbered those of North Korea. If Pusan was to be the UN expedition’s last stand, it would at least be a strong one. For the next six weeks, Pyongyang’s forces hurled themselves at the UN lines in a series of massive nighttime assaults aimed at smashing through the Pusan perimeter before the United States could mobilize its full resources. Some of the fiercest clashes occurred at a bend of the river called the Nakdong Bulge, where North Korean troops came close to overrunning UN positions. While the fighting raged along the river, UN and DPRK tanks fought a weeklong battle in the steep valley (dubbed the Bowling Alley) to the north of Taegu. North Korean T-34s and American Pershing battle tanks traded armor-piercing shells throughout the valley. But UN defenses held and staged a successful counterattack that brought the battle for the valley to an end on August 24. The Battle of the Pusan Perimeter continued until mid-September.47 UN forces had stabilized the perimeter and prevented wholesale disaster. MacArthur now began planning his next move.
THE SUMMER OF 1950 FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED the Cold War struggle. Faced with the threats of Communist China and a nuclearized Soviet Union, American leaders resolved to throw their military resources into interventions in the postcolonial world. Breaking with George Kennan’s visions of containment as a patient political and economic struggle, the United States adopted a central Cold War strategy that would henceforth be a militarized endeavor. Moscow and Beijing had also demonstrated their commitment to supporting left-wing revolutionaries. Working with Beijing, Stalin could project greater influence into North Korea without deploying the Soviet Army in peripheral areas such as Korea. Likewise, the Sino-Soviet partnership allowed Mao to increase Beijing’s support for revolutionary movements throughout East Asia. Finally, the Korean intervention showcased what was to become an enduring dynamic of the Cold War: areas of seemingly marginal strategic significance could become major geopolitical flashpoints.