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Korea: Mao, Bugles, Tins of Cheese

In March 1946, exiled from power, Churchill had made his famous ‘iron curtain’ speech at Fulton, Missouri. Across Central and Eastern Europe, behind that iron curtain, client Communist parties and Russian stooges had engaged in murder, vote-rigging, threats and eventually outright putsches – notably in Prague – to put themselves in power. Crisis followed crisis. Stalin had tried to throttle West Berlin, a crowded democratic atoll inside Soviet-controlled East Germany. He had hoped to persuade the West not to form an independent West German state with its own currency, but he failed. Much encouraged by Attlee and Bevin, the Americans led a massive airlift to keep the besieged city supplied. By the time the blockade ended more than 270,000 flights into Berlin had been made, carrying in fuel, food and clothing. It was an extraordinary act of succour and a dangerous one, which was wholly successful. Meanwhile there was a strong possibility of war between the Russians and the rebel communists of Tito’s Yugoslavia – Stalin had planned to assassinate Tito for insubordination. With American nuclear bombers in East Anglia, and the Russians also now possessors of the Bomb, the danger seemed all-consuming and the threat relentless. And in 1950 Britain was at war again, this time alongside the Americans and a wide alliance of other countries.

Aside from military historians, Korea has become the forgotten war. Yet it was a genuinely dangerous global confrontation in which Britain played an important if subsidiary role. It was the first and only time when British troops have directly fought a major Communist army, Mao’s Chinese People’s Liberation Army; and it was a long and bloody conflict. Britain and her Commonwealth allies, fighting with a mixture of professional soldiers and young National Service conscripts, lost more than a thousand dead and nearly three times as many wounded. The overall UN casualties were around 142,000. All that was terrible enough, but it could have been much worse. The American commander, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, fresh from his role as effective dictator of post-war Japan, and considered by his President to be unhinged, was keen to open full-scale operations against Communist China itself. As they struggled against a peasant army across icy, rocky hills and through paddy-fields the US military contemplated using their new atomic bombs to lay down an irradiated dead zone between Korea and China. President Truman had no intention of allowing MacArthur to start loosing off nuclear bombs but a little later, in 1953, his successor, President Eisenhower, did raise the possibility of using nuclear strikes directly against China.

In a memorandum to Attlee’s government, the British chiefs of staff wrote with elegant understatement that ‘from the military point of view…the dropping of an atomic bomb in North Korea would be unsound. The effects of such action would be world-wide, and might well be very damaging. Moreover, it would probably provoke a global war.’ Labour MPs wanted the nuclear bomb to be limited to use by the UN, a somewhat strange notion, and Attlee went to Washington to check that Truman was not about to engulf the world in atomic conflict. What no one in Whitehall or Washington knew then, though they might have guessed it, was that Mao had decided to use unfortunate Korea as a ‘meat-grinder’ war, in which the huge numbers of Western deaths would break the morale of the capitalist West and gain him vital credit with Stalin, so persuading Moscow to share nuclear secrets with Beijing. In March 1951, Mao told the Soviet dictator that his plan was ‘to spend several years consuming several hundred thousand American lives’. Had he been more militarily successful, the temptation to go nuclear would have been great. Though the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 is remembered, rightly, as the moment when the world came nearest to nuclear war, there was a serious possibility of it happening earlier, in Korea and China.

The scale of the challenge in Korea after the Communist north invaded on 25 June 1950 quickly persuaded the British government that troops and ships should be sent to help the Americans and the flailing southern regime of Syngman Rhee. There was little disagreement, either in the government or the Commons. Compared to Vietnam, this was a consensual war, carried out under the freshly designed blue and white flag of the United Nations. On the North Korean and Chinese side, half a million men were engaged and, by the time the war ended, three million Chinese had fought in Korea. The Chinese later told their allies that they lost 400,000 men, many of them former anti-Communist soldiers of Chiang Kai-shek’s army cynically sent as useful fodder. Among UN forces there would be Australians and Canadians, Belgians, French, Dutch, Thais, Ethiopians, Greeks, Turks, Colombians and others. Wherever they came from most of those who found themselves in Korea hated the country. In winter, the front line was bitterly cold, at other times it was overrun with vermin. Human excrement was used to fertilize the fields which while hardly unknown in rural economies provided a pungent scent which remained in many veterans’ minds ever afterwards.

British forces performed bravely in important battles but found the cultural divide with the Americans had grown even wider in the past five years. The most famous example was the heroic stand of the ‘the Glorious Glosters’ above the Imjin river in April 1951 when with other troops including Ulstermen, Canadians and Belgians, the first battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment found itself suddenly facing the full force of the fifth major Chinese offensive of the war. Hugely outnumbered, lacking heavy artillery or aircraft support and soon cut off by the advancing tides of communist troops, Brigadier Tom Brodie called for help from the Americans, explaining that the British position was ‘a bit sticky’. Not realizing that this was stiff-upper-lip for ‘catastrophic’, the American commander told him cheerfully just to sit tight. After the battle which followed, just 169 of the 850 Glosters were left for roll-call. Sixty-three had been killed, around 200 badly injured and the rest captured by the Chinese, who had themselves lost an astonishing 10,000 men in the attack. After four desperate days, the Glosters had been able to hold on no longer. At one point, responding to the bugles and trumpets used by the Chinese commanders to signal yet another charge, the Glosters’ drum-major was told to respond with every bugle-call he could remember; so the men fought under the strains not just of ‘reveille’ but ‘defaulters’ and ‘officers dress for dinner’. In another position, when the ammunition finally ran out, the Glosters were reduced to throwing tins of processed cheese at the Chinese in the (vain) hope they would be mistaken for grenades. Yet the action, for all its hopelessness and poignant comedy, did check the advance of the People’s Liberation Army at a vital moment. One historian of the war concluded that at Imjin, ‘the most political army in the world encountered the least political – and was savagely mauled to gain its few sterile miles of rock and paddy…Across the breadth of the Korean front, Peking’s spring offensive had failed. Never again in the war did the communists mount an all-out assault which appeared to have the slightest prospect of strategic success.’

There were further brave British actions by the Black Watch and, two years after Imjin, by the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment. Three-quarters composed of young National Service conscripts earning just £1.62 a week, they held back the Chinese on a ridge nicknamed the Hook. Though eighteen-year-olds were banned from Korea many lied to see some action. British troops said the two worst-paid armies serving there were themselves and the Chinese. Throughout the war, of course, it was American commanders and politicians who directed strategy, perhaps the single most important and far-sighted action coming from the top when President Truman finally sacked MacArthur. By the time of the eventual armistice in July 1953 returning British troops, including prisoners who had endured appalling torture and malnutrition, found the public largely uninterested in them. There had been a major drive by the Chinese to indoctrinate British conscripts but with the exception of a spy who was later unmasked and a single Scottish soldier who, perhaps recalling the social cheer to be enjoyed in Scotland in the early fifties, opted to remain in Red China, it was ineffective. Though the Chinese political officers included some with fluent English, there was little communication: it seems that rich Geordie, Scottish and West Country accents completely defeated them.

In some ways, Korea can be compared to the Iraq wars, the first of which had UN backing, and both of which were American wars in which Britain played a secondary role. As with Iraq, at the time of Korea half a century earlier, British public opinion found the country’s regional allies unattractive and undemocratic. The Syngman Rhee regime in the south was as despotic as Pakistan or Saudi Arabia but more ruthless and vicious, as well as being spectacularly ungrateful. As with Iraq, British journalists did much to spread disenchantment about the war. James Cameron, a brilliantly talented left-wing reporter with a huge reputation, lost his job with the then-popular magazine Picture Post after revealing the condition of political prisoners held by the south. ‘They were skeletons,’ he later wrote, ‘they were puppets of skin with sinews for strings – their faces were a terrible, translucent grey and they cringed like dogs.’ As with Iraq, Britain struggled to use what leverage she had. Attlee flew to Washington to try to persuade Truman not to use atomic weapons, as Tony Blair flew there to persuade George W. Bush to try harder for UN support. As with Iraq, British troops behaved bravely under difficult conditions and returned home to find a country that did not want to know.

East Germany’s Communist leader bragged that after Korea, West Germany would be next for liberation with tanks. Stalin had indeed considered trying to grab the rest of Germany, as well as Spain and Italy, and had discussed with his advisers an attack on the American Pacific fleet. In October 1950 he told Mao that a Third World War should not necessarily be avoided: ‘If a war is inevitable, then let it be waged now, and not in a few years’ time.’ In West Germany, comfortably based in former SS and Luftwaffe barracks (the Germans had provided double-glazing, central heating, sports facilities and cinemas for the fighting men of the Third Reich), some 80,000 British soldiers were waiting for the Red Army to make a surprise attack. As in Korea many were National Service conscripts. Many of the British tanks were hopelessly out of date, 1939 Valentines and clapped-out Churchills. As Soviet aircraft buzzed Western defences to test them out, there was an assumption in Whitehall that when the attack came Nato would be able to hold out with conventional forces for only a few days. It would have been 1940 all over again with one stark difference. To protect itself against the Soviet blitzkrieg the West would have had to go nuclear at an early stage. Politicians and commentators would become obsessed by the technical detail of the arms race as it lurched forward.

The huge rearmament that followed, with the Americans leading the way, Britain and France following, had grave consequences for Britain. Having been a founding member of the UN and Nato, Britain felt confirmed as a global player, with global responsibilities. The cost was crippling. Korea itself was not the cause of the financial squeeze – the official historian of that war pointed out that ‘the sum was a mite compared to the volume of British rearmament for Nato during the same period’. It was, however, part of the shift of resources back to khaki and jets which meant Labour hurriedly diverting money from the new National Health Service. Some 300,000 men a year were taken out of the job market at a time of serious labour shortages. Another unplanned consequence was that West Germany was quickly back on her feet again since her new machine tool factories were desperately needed to re-equip Britain. Soon these same factories would be exposing archaic, ill-managed British industry to serious competition in other areas. But perhaps the most serious domestic consequence of rearmament was on morale or the spirit of the times. The Cold War shaped post-war Europe. In Britain it helped quickly blight the sunny optimism about a better future that so briefly bloomed in the years after the war.