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CHAPTER ONE THE COURSE OF THE WAR

On the very day that President Barack Obama fielded a student’s question in Moscow about whether a new Korean War was in the offing (July 7, 2009), the papers were filled with commentary on the death of Robert Strange McNamara. The editors of The New York Times and one of its best columnists, Bob Herbert, condemned McNamara for knowing the Vietnam War was un-winnable yet sending tens of thousands of young Americans to their deaths

anyway: “How in God’s name did he ever look at himself in the mirror?” Herbert wrote. They all assumed that the war itself was a colossal error. But if McNamara had been able to stabilize South Vietnam and divide the country permanently (say with his “electronic fence”), thousands of our troops would still be there along a DMZ and evil would still reside in Hanoi. McNamara also had a minor planning role in the firebombing of Japanese cities in World War II: “What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” he asked; people like himself and Curtis LeMay, the commander of the air attacks, “were behaving as war criminals.” McNamara derived these lessons from losing the Vietnam War: we did not know the enemy, we lacked “empathy” (we should have “put ourselves inside their skin and look[ed] at us through their eyes,” but we did not); we were blind prisoners of our own assumptions. 1 In Korea we still are. Korea is an ancient nation, and one of the very few places in the world where territorial boundaries, ethnicity, and language have been consistent for well over a millennium. It sits next to China and was deeply influenced by the Middle Kingdom, but it has always had an independent civilization. Few understand this, but the most observant journalist in the war, Reginald Thompson, put the point exactly: “the thought and law of China is woven into the very texture of Korea … as the law of Rome is woven into Britain.” The distinction is between the stereotypical judgment that Korea is just “Little China,” or nothing more than a transmission belt for Buddhist and Confucian culture flowing into Japan, and a nation and culture as different from Japan or China as Italy or France is from Germany. Korea also had a social structure that persisted for centuries: during the five hundred years of the last dynasty the vast majority of Koreans were peasants, most of them tenants working land held by one of the world’s most tenacious aristocracies. Many were also slaves, a hereditary status from generation to generation. The state squelched merchant activity, so that commerce, and anything resembling the green shoots of a middle class, barely developed. This fundamental condition—a privileged landed class, a mass of peasants, and little leavening in between—lasted through twentieth-century colonialism, too, because after their rule began in 1910 the Japanese found it useful to operate through local landed power. So, amid the crisis of national division, upheaval,

and war, Koreans also sought to rectify these ancient inequities. But this aristocracy, known as yangban, did not last so long and survive one crisis after another by being purely exploitative; it fostered a scholar-official elite, a civil service, venerable statecraft, splendid works of art, and a national pastime of educating the young. In the relative openness of the 1920s, young scions proliferated in one profession after another—commerce, industry, publishing, academia, films, literary pursuits, urban consumption—a budding elite that could readily have led an independent Korea. 2 But global depression, war, and ever-increasing Japanese repression in the 1930s destroyed much of this progress, turned many elite Koreans into collaborators, and left few options for patriots besides armed resistance. Korea was at its modern nadir during the war, yet this is where most of the millions of Americans who served in Korea got their impressions—ones that often depended on where the eye chose to fall. Foreigners and GIs saw dirt and mud and squalor, but Thompson saw villages “of pure enchantment, the tiles of the roofs up-curled at eaves and corners … the women [in] bright colours, crimson and the pale pink of watermelon flesh, and vivid emerald green, their bodies wrapped tightly to give them a tubular appearance.” Reginald Thompson had been all over the world; most GIs had never been out of their country, or perhaps their hometowns. What his vantage point in 1950 told him, in effect, was this: here was the Vietnam War we came to know before Vietnam—gooks, napalm, rapes, whores, an unreliable ally, a cunning enemy, fundamentally untrained GIs fighting a war their top generals barely understood, fragging of officers, 3 contempt for the know-nothing civilians back home, devilish battles indescribable even to loved ones, press handouts from Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters apparently scripted by comedians or lunatics, an ostensible vision of bringing freedom and liberty to a sordid dictatorship run by servants of Japanese imperialism. “What a Quixotic business,” Thompson wrote, trying to impose democracy—to try to achieve “an evolutionary result without evolution.” The only outcome of fending off the North, he thought, would be a long occupation if not “conquest and colonization.”

THE CONVENTIONAL WAR BEGINS The war Americans know began on the remote, inaccessible Ongjin Peninsula, northwest of Seoul, on the night of June 24–25, 1950, Korean time; this was also the point at which border fighting began in May 1949, and the absence of independent observers has meant that both Korean sides have claimed ever since that they were attacked first. During the long, hot summer of 1949, one pregnant with impending conflict, the ROK had expanded its army to about 100,000 troops, a strength the North did not match until early 1950. American order-of-battle data showed the two armies at about equal strength by June 1950. Early that month, MacArthur’s intelligence apparatus identified a total of 74,370 Korean People’s Army (KPA) soldiers, with another 20,000 or so in the Border Constabulary. The Republic of Korea Army (ROKA) order of battle showed a total of 87,500 soldiers, with 32,500 soldiers at the border, 35,000 within thirty-five miles, or a day’s march, of the 38th parallel. This data did not account for the superior battle experience of the northern army, however, especially among the large contingents that had returned from the Chinese civil war. The North also had about 150 Soviet T-34 tanks and a small but useful air force of 70 fighters and 62 light bombers—either left behind when Soviet troops evacuated in December 1948, or purchased from Moscow and Beijing in 1949–50 (when war bond drives ensued for months in the North). Only about 20,000 South Korean troops remained in the more distant interior. This was the result of a significant redeployment northward toward the parallel in the early months of 1950, after the southern guerrillas appeared to have been crushed. The northern army had also redeployed southward in May and June 1950, but many KPA units—at least one third—were not aware of the impending invasion and thus were not mobilized to fight on June 25. Furthermore, thousands of Korean troops were still fighting in China at this time. Just one week before the invasion John Foster Dulles visited Seoul and the 38th parallel. By then he was a roving ambassador and, as the odds-on Republican choice for secretary of state, a symbol of Harry Truman’s attempt at bipartisanship after Republicans opened up on him with the “who lost China?”

campaign. In meetings with Syngman Rhee the latter not only pushed for a direct American defense of the ROK, but advocated an attack on the North. One of Dulles’s favorite reporters, William Mathews, was there and wrote just after Dulles’s meeting that Rhee was “militantly for the unification of Korea. Openly says it must be brought about soon … Rhee pleads justice of going into North country. Thinks it could succeed in a few days … if he can do it with our help, he will do it.” Mathews noted that Rhee said he would attack even if “it brought on a general war.” All this is yet more proof of Rhee’s provocative behavior, but it is no different from his threats to march north made many times before. The Dulles visit was merely vintage Rhee: there is no evidence that Dulles was in collusion with him.4 But what might the North Koreans have thought?

John Foster Dulles peering across the 38th parallel, June 19, 1950. To his left, in the pith helmet, is Defense Minister Shin Sung-mo; behind him, in the porkpie hat, is Foreign Minister Ben Limb. U.S. National Archives

That is the question a historian put to Dean Acheson, Truman’s secretary of state, in a seminar after the Korean War: “Are you sure his presence didn’t provoke the attack, Dean? There has been comment about that—I don’t think it did. You have no views on the subject?” Acheson’s deadpan response: “No, I have no views on the subject.” George Kennan then interjected, “There is a comical aspect to this, because the visits of these people over there, and their peering over outposts with binoculars at the Soviet people, I think must have led the Soviets to think that we were on to their plan and caused them considerable perturbation.” “Yes,” Acheson said. “Foster up in a bunker with a homburg on—it was a very amusing picture.”5 Pyongyang has never tired of waving that photo around. At the same time, the veteran industrialist Pak Hung-sik showed up in Tokyo and gave an interview to The Oriental Economist, published on June 24, 1950—the day before the war started. Described as an adviser to the Korean Economic Mission (that is, the Marshall Plan), he was also said to have “a circle of friends and acquaintances among the Japanese” (a bit of an understatement; Pak was widely thought in South and North to have been the most notorious collaborator with Japanese imperialism). In the years after liberation in 1945 a lot of anti-Japanese feeling had welled up in Korea, Pak said, owing to the return of “numerous revolutionists and nationalists.” By 1950, however, there was “hardly any trace of it.” Instead, the ROK was “acting as a bulwark of peace” at the 38th parallel, and “the central figures in charge of national defense are mostly graduates of the former Military College of Japan.” Korea and Japan were “destined to go hand in hand, to live and let live,” and thus bad feelings should be “cast overboard.” The current problem, Pak said, was the unfortunate one that “an economic unity is lacking whereas in prewar days Japan, Manchuria, Korea, and Formosa economically combined to make an organic whole.” Pak Hung-sik was the embodiment of the Japanese colonial idea—having been born a Korean his only unfortunate, but not insurmountable, fate. For Pak and Kim Il Sung, the 1930s were the beginning: hugely expanded business opportunities for Pak (the founder of Seoul’s Hwashin department store, its first on the American model), a decade

of unimaginably harsh struggle for Kim. After this beginning, a civil war between the young leaders of Korea who chose to collaborate with or to resist Japan in the 1930s was entirely conceivable, and probably inevitable. War came on the last weekend in June 1950, a weekend about which much still remains to be learned. It is now clear from Soviet documents that Pyongyang had made a decision to escalate the civil conflict to the level of conventional warfare many months before June 1950, having tired of the inconclusive guerrilla struggle in the south, and perhaps hoping to seize on a southern provocation like many that occurred in 1949, thus to settle the hash of the Rhee regime. Maturing clandestine American plans to launch a coup d’état against Chiang Kai-shek on Taiwan complicated this same weekend; Dean Rusk met with several Chinese at the Plaza hotel in New York on the evening of June 23, 1950, hoping that they would form a government to replace Chiang’s regime, which was threatened by an impending invasion from the Chinese Communists. He and Acheson wanted a reliable leader in Taipei, so that their secret desire to keep the island separate from mainland control would field a government that Truman could justify supporting. 6 The fighting on Ongjin began around 3 or 4 A.M. on June 25; initial intelligence reports were inconclusive as to who started it. Later on, attacking elements were said to be from the 3rd Brigade of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) Border Constabulary, joined at 5:30 A.M. by the formidable 6th Division. At about the same time, according to the American official history, KPA forces at the parallel south of Chorwon assaulted the 1st Regiment of the ROKA 7th Division, dealing it heavy casualties; it gave way and the 3rd and 4th KPA divisions, with an armored brigade, crashed through and began a daunting march toward Seoul. South Korean sources asserted, however, that elements of the 17th Regiment had counterattacked on the Ongjin Peninsula and were in possession of Haeju city, the only important point north of the 38th parallel claimed to have been taken by ROK forces. Roy Appleman, America’s official historian of the war, relied on James Hausman’s heavily sanitized account of the war’s start on the Ongjin Peninsula. Hausman later told a Thames Television documentary crew that his good friend Paek In-yop (brother to Paek Son-yop) was the commander on Ongjin, “and

when the war broke out as you know he was there not only defending his line but counterattacking” (that is, across the parallel). As for “those who think that the South may have started this war,” Hausman went on, “I think … I think they’re wrong.” Another Thames interviewee, Col. James Peach, an Australian who was with the UN observer group, reported that the Ongjin commander, Paek, was “a get-going sort of chap” who led the “twin-tiger” 17th Regimental Combat Team: “I, I never quite knew what went on. There’s a bit of a mystery still about Haeju, I think it might have been Paek and his merry men, the 17th Regiment, attacking it … We didn’t hear anything about it until the war had been going for a while, and I never quite knew what went on. It’s been said that they attacked there and that the North Koreans responded.” Peach went on to say that he didn’t think this version held much water. (Note also that if the South Koreans attack, it is “Paek and his merry men”; when the North Koreans do the same, it is heinous aggression.) 7 Whether 17th Regiment soldiers may have occupied Haeju on June 25, or even initiated the fighting on Ongjin, is still inconclusive, with the existing evidence pointing both ways. There is no evidence, however, to back up the North’s claim that the South launched a general invasion; at worst there may have been a small assault across the parallel, as happened many times in 1949. Whatever transpired, the North met it with a full invasion. South of the attacking KPA units was the ROK 7th Division, headquartered at the critical invasion-route town of Uijongbu; it had not committed its forces to battle even by the morning of June 26, probably because it was waiting to be reinforced by the 2nd Division, which had entrained northward from Taejon. When the 2nd Division arrived later that day, it collapsed and the troops panicked. It was through this gaping hole in the Uijongbu corridor that North Korean troops poured on the afternoon and evening of June 26, thus jeopardizing the capital. An American official on the scene later wrote that “the failure of the 2nd Division to fight” was the main reason for the quick loss of Seoul. South Korean units mutinied or fled before the oncoming Northern troops for many reasons, including their relative lack of firepower, their poor training, their officers who had served Japan, and ultimately the unpopularity of the Rhee government—which had nearly been voted out by a moderate coalition in

reasonably free elections held on May 30, 1950. President Rhee tried to leave the city with his top officials as early as Sunday evening, and on June 27 the entire ROK Army headquarters relocated south of Seoul, without telling their American allies. That left troops engaging the enemy north of Seoul without communications, and panicked both the troops and the civilian population. The next day most ROK divisions followed suit, withdrawing to the south of the capital, and Gen. “Fatty” Chae famously and egregiously blew the major Han River bridge without warning, killing hundreds who were crossing it. Later that day President Rhee took off southward in his special train. During the battle for Taejon he vowed to stay there and fight to the death, but soon he was back on his train, headed for the southwestern port of Mokpo, thence by naval launch to Pusan, where he would remain inside the defensive perimeter.8 Military morale evaporated and civilians panicked. Seoul fell to a Northern invasion force of about 37,000 troops. By month’s end fully half of the ROKA soldiers were dead, captured, or missing. Only two divisions had their equipment and weapons, all the rest (about 70 percent of the total) having been left in place or lost on the battlefield. The quick and virtually complete collapse of resistance in the South energized the United States to enter the war in force. Secretary of State Dean Acheson dominated the decision making, which soon committed American air and ground forces to the fight. On the night of June 24 (Washington time), Acheson decided to take the Korean question to the UN, before he had notified President Truman of the fighting; he then told Truman there was no need to have him back in Washington until the next day. At emergency White House meetings on the evening of June 25, Acheson argued for increased military aid to the ROK, U.S. Air Force cover for the evacuation of Americans, and the interposition of the Seventh Fleet between Taiwan and the China mainland—thus obviating a Communist invasion of the island, dividing China and leaving Taiwan governed by the Republic of China even today. On the afternoon of June 26 Acheson labored alone on the fundamental decisions committing American air and naval power to the Korean War, which were approved by the White House that evening. Thus the decision to intervene in force was Acheson’s decision, supported

by the president but taken before United Nations, Pentagon, or congressional approval. His reasoning had little to do with Korea’s strategic value, and everything to do with American prestige and political economy: “prestige is the shadow cast by power,” he once said, and the North Koreans had challenged it; American credibility was therefore at stake. South Korea was also essential to Japan’s industrial revival, Acheson thought, as part of his “great crescent” strategy linking northeast Asia with the Middle East (and which we discuss later on). George Kennan, who supported the June decisions, recalled from notes taken at the time that Acheson broke off collegial discussions on the afternoon of June 26: He wanted time to be alone and to dictate. We were called in [three hours later] and he read to us a paper he had produced, which was the first draft of the statement finally issued by the President, and which was not significantly changed by the time it finally appeared, the following day … the course actually taken by this Government was not something pressed upon [Acheson] by the military leaders, but rather something arrived at by himself, in solitary deliberation. Acheson later concurred with Kennan, saying, “that’s as I recall it.” Kennan noted that the decisions of June 26 were the key ones; Acheson agreed that they were taken before congressional or UN consultations (“it wasn’t until 3:00 in the afternoon [on June 27] that the U.N. asked us to do what we said we were going to … in the morning”). 9 On this same summer Saturday evening the Soviet ambassador to the UN, Adam Malik, was taking his ease on Long Island rather than wielding his much used and abused veto on the Security Council, a boycott conducted ostensibly because the UN had refused to admit China. He was planning to return to Moscow for consultations on July 6.10 The longtime Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, later told Dean Rusk that on Saturday night Malik instantly wired Moscow for instructions, and for the first time ever in its experience got

back a message direct from Generalissimo Stalin: nyet, do not attend. 11 Stalin’s reasons are not known, but he may have hoped to facilitate the entry of U.S. forces into a peripheral area, thus to waste blood and treasure, or perhaps he hoped that American dominance of the UN would destroy the perceived universality of the international body. Acheson’s June 25–26 decisions prefigured the commitment of American ground forces, which came in the early hours of June 30. The Joint Chiefs of Staff remained “extremely reluctant” to commit infantry troops to the fighting right up to June 30, and were not consulted when Truman made his decision. They were reticent both because Korea was a strategic cul-de-sac and perhaps a trap in the global struggle with Moscow, and because the total armed strength of the U.S. Army was 593,167, with an additional 75,370 in the Marines. North Korea alone was capable of mobilizing upward of 200,000 combat soldiers in the summer of 1950, quite apart from the immense manpower reserve of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The immediate precipitating factor for the decision to dispatch U.S. ground forces was MacArthur’s conclusion, after visiting the front lines, that the ROK Army had mostly ceased to fight. From the start of the war and throughout the summer and fall of 1950, Korean units ceased to exist, lacked equipment to fight the North Koreans, or proved unable to hold the lines in their sectors. Most veterans of the first two years of the war thought South Koreans “did no fighting worthy of the name,” they just broke and ran. (By the summer of 1951 the ROKA had lost enough matériel to outfit ten divisions, according to Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway, and still needed “thorough training and equipment and instruction on all levels.”) An American colonel told the British journalist Philip Knightly, “South Koreans and North Koreans are identical. Why then do North Koreans fight like tigers and South Koreans run like sheep?” The Morse code “HA” was used all over the front to signal that South Korean forces were “hauling ass.” ROKA officers exploited their own men, and beat them mercilessly for infractions. One GI observed an officer execute a man for going AWOL, shooting him in the back of the head and kicking him into a grave. The man had a wife and three children. But racism also infected GI views of their Korean enemy and ally. Most Americans, a veteran remembered, “had an

ingrained prejudice against Koreans” that made any kind of empathy or understanding difficult. “They hated Koreans by reflex action.” It was only after truce talks began in 1951 that the ROKA had the time to develop, however slowly, its fighting temper. 12 But the Americans also had no idea that they would be fighting against truly effective troops, a disastrous misjudgment of the Korean enemy that began right at the top, on the day the war began. “I can handle it with one arm tied behind my back,” MacArthur said; the next day he remarked to John Foster Dulles that if he could only put the 1st Cavalry Division into Korea, “why, heavens, you’d see these fellows scuttle up to the Manchurian border so quick, you would see no more of them.” At first MacArthur wanted an American regimental combat team, then two divisions. Within a week, however, he cabled Washington that only a quarter of the ROKA troops could even be located, and that the KPA was “operating under excellent top level guidance and had demonstrated superior command of strategic and tactical principles.” By the beginning of July he wanted a minimum of 30,000 American combat soldiers, meaning more than four infantry divisions, three tank battalions, and assorted artillery; a week later he asked for eight divisions. 13 Misjudgments also grew out of the ubiquitous racism of whites coming from a segregated American society, where Koreans were “people of color” subjected to apartheid-like restrictions (they drank from “colored” fountains in Virginia, could not marry Caucasians in other southern states, and could not own property in many western states). Consider the judgment of the respected military editor of The New York Times, Hanson Baldwin, three weeks after the war began: We are facing an army of barbarians in Korea, but they are barbarians as trained, as relentless, as reckless of life, and as skilled in the tactics of the kind of war they fight as the hordes of Genghis Khan.… They have taken a leaf from the Nazi book of blitzkrieg and are employing all the weapons of fear and terror. Chinese Communists were reported to have joined the fighting, he erred in saying, and not far behind might be “Mongolians, Soviet Asiatics and a variety of

races”—some of “the most primitive of peoples.” Elsewhere Baldwin likened the Koreans to invading locusts; he ended by recommending that Americans be given “more realistic training to meet the barbarian discipline of the armored horde.”14 A few days later Baldwin remarked that to the Korean, life is cheap: “behind him stand the hordes of Asia. Ahead of him lies the hope of loot.” What else “brings him shrieking on,” what else explains his “fanatical determination”?15 Mongolians, Asiatics, Nazis, locusts, primitives, hordes, thieves—one would think Baldwin had exhausted his bag of bigotry to capture a people invading their homeland and defending it against the world’s most powerful army. But he came up with another way to deal with “the problem of the convinced fanatic”: In their extensive war against Russian partisans, the Germans found that the only answer to guerrillas … was “to win friends and influence people” among the civilian population. The actual pacification of the country means just that. (A pacification, perhaps, like that in the Ukraine.) Somewhat uncomfortable with North Korean indignation about “women and children slain by American bombs,” Baldwin went on to say that Koreans must understand that “we do not come merely to bring devastation.” Americans must convince “these simple, primitive, and barbaric peoples … that we—not the Communists—are their friends.”16 Now hear the chief counsel for war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials, Telford Taylor: The traditions and practices of warfare in the Orient are not identical with those that have developed in the Occident … individual lives are not valued so highly in Eastern mores. And it is totally unrealistic of us to expect the individual Korean soldier … to follow our most elevated precepts of warfare.17 In the summer months of 1950 the Korean People’s Army pushed

southward with dramatic success, with one humiliating defeat after another for American forces. An army that had bested Germany and Japan found its back pressed to the wall by what it thought was a hastily assembled peasant military, ill-equipped and, worse, said to be doing the bidding of a foreign imperial power. By the end of July, American and ROK forces outnumbered the KPA along the front, 92,000 to 70,000 (47,000 were Americans), but in spite of this, the retreat continued. In early August, however, the 1st Marine Brigade went into action and finally halted the KPA advance. The front did not change much from then until the end of August. The fighting stabilized at what came to be called the Pusan Perimeter, an eighty-by-fifty-mile right-angled front. Kim Il Sung later said that the plan was to win the war for the South in one month, and by the end of July he had nearly done so. This perimeter had its northern anchor on the coast around Pohang, its southeastern anchor in the coastal Chinju-Masan region, and its center just above the major city of Taegu. The latter became a symbol of the American determination to stanch the KPA’s advance; but it was Pohang in the northeast that was probably the key to stopping the KPA from occupying Pusan and unifying the peninsula. Roy Appleman wrote that the “major tactical mistake” of the North Koreans was not to press their advantage on the northeast coastal road. The KPA 5th Division worried too much about covering its flanks, instead of moving quickly on Pohang and thence combining with the 6th Division marching from the southeast to menace Pusan. Northern forces had paused south of the capital for nearly a week before restarting a dual-pincer, tank-led blitzkrieg to the southwest and southeast. This pause has caused some historians to wonder if the initial thrust was aimed mainly at Seoul, the nerve center of the South, hoping to hold it and watch the Rhee regime collapse; in any case the pause gave vital time to MacArthur to organize a defensive line in the southeast. This perimeter became the place where American power finally stiffened. North Korea had brought its forces along the perimeter to 98,000, and thousands of guerrillas, including many women, were active in the fighting. In August Gen. John H. Church, commander of the 24th Infantry Division and a veteran of the Anzio campaign, concluded that Korea was not like the European battles of World War II: “It’s an entirely different kind of warfare,

this is really guerrilla warfare.” It was “essentially a guerrilla war over rugged territory,” according to British sources; American troops were “constantly exposed to the threat of infiltration by guerrillas sweeping down from the hills into and behind its positions.” 18 Virtually any village suspected of harboring or supporting guerrillas was burned to the ground, usually from the air. Furthermore, cities and towns thought to be leftist in inclination were simply emptied of their population through forced evacuations. All but 10 percent of civilians were moved out of Sunchon, Masan was emptied of tens of thousands of citizens, “all civilians” were moved out of Yechon. Amid a threat that “the leftists and Fifth column, living in Taegu, are conspiring to create a big disturbance,” and with the perimeter under great strain, vast numbers of Taegu citizens were evacuated for fear of “an uprising.” By mid-August, many of these removed citizens were concentrated on islands near Pusan, forbidden to leave.19 Still, by this time the North Koreans were badly outnumbered. MacArthur had succeeded in committing most of the battle-ready divisions in the entire American armed forces to the Korean fighting; by September 8 all available combat-trained army units had been dispatched to Korea except for the 82nd Airborne Division. Although many of these units were with the impending Inchon amphibious operation, some 83,000 American soldiers and another 57,000 South Korean and British faced the North Koreans along the front. By this time the Americans had five times as many tanks as the KPA, their artillery was vastly superior, and they had complete control of the air since the early days of the war. At the end of August North Korean forces launched their last major offensive along the perimeter, making “startling gains” over the next two weeks, which severely strained the UN lines. On August 28, Gen. Pang Ho-san ordered his troops to take Masan and Pusan in the next few days; three KPA battalions succeeded in crossing the Naktong River in the central sector, Pohang and Chinju were lost, and the perimeter was “near the breaking point” with KPA forces pressing on Kyongju, Masan, and Taegu. U.S. commanders relocated Eighth Army headquarters from Taegu to Pusan, and prominent South Koreans began leaving Pusan for Tsushima. On September 9, Kim Il Sung said the war had

reached an “extremely harsh, decisive stage,” with the enemy being pressed on three fronts; two days later U.S. commanders reported that the frontline situation was the most dangerous since the perimeter had been established. “After two weeks of the heaviest fighting of the war,” Appleman wrote, UN forces “had just barely turned back the great North Korean offensive.” American casualties were the highest of the war to date, totaling 20,000, with 4,280 dead, by September 15. In mid-September 1950, General MacArthur masterminded his last hurrah, a tactically brilliant amphibious landing at Inchon that brought American armed forces back to Seoul five years after they first set foot on Korean soil. Inchon Harbor has treacherous tides that can easily ground a flotilla of ships if they choose the wrong time, but the American passage through the shifting bays and flats was flawless. Adm. Arthur Dewey Struble, the navy’s crack amphibious expert who led the World War II landing operations at Leyte in the Philippines and who directed the naval operations off Omaha Beach during the Normandy invasion, commanded an enormous fleet of 270 ships in the Inchon operations, depositing eighty thousand marines with hardly a loss. The marines landed mostly unopposed, but then slogged through a deadly gauntlet before Seoul finally fell at the end of September. Against this the North Koreans could do nothing; Kim Il Sung placed about two thousand poorly trained troops to defend the harbor, and for unknown reasons, failed to mine the port. They were not surprised by the invasion, as the American mythology has it, but could not resist it and so began what their historians call euphemistically “the great strategic retreat.” Regular North Korean forces continued pulling back in the face of the American decision to launch attacks across the parallel in early October, luring the enemy in deep, influencing MacArthur to split his forces into two huge columns against much contrary advice, and imploring their Chinese allies to come to their aid. Captured documents show that the North made a critical decision to fight the Americans at key points to cover a general withdrawal of their forces; a captured notebook quoted Pak Ki-song, chief of political intelligence in the KPA 8th Division: The main force of the enemy still remained intact, not having been fully

damaged. When they were not fully aware of the power of our forces, they pushed their infantry far forward … to the Yalu River. This indicated that they underestimated us. All these conditions were favorable to lure them near. Another KPA officer captured at the time of the joint Sino-Korean offensive said that until late November, the KPA had been “continuously withdrawing”: One may think that going down all the way to the Pusan perimeter and then withdrawing all the way to the Yalu River was a complete defeat. But that is not so. That was a planned withdrawal. We withdrew because we knew that UN troops would follow us up here, and that they would spread their troops thinly all over the vast area. Now, the time has come for us to envelop these troops and annihilate them. He said that combined KPA and Chinese forces striking from the front would be aided by “eight strong corps which will harass and attack the enemy from the rear.”20 Although large numbers of foot-soldiers were captured in MacArthur’s trap, most officers escaped and led large units back through the mountains and into the North. Many guerrillas also escaped into mountainous areas of the South, and became a major problem for American forces in the winter of 1950–51. (In early 1951 KPA forces had moved back as far south as Andong and Sangju in North Kyongsang province to envelop UN troops.) Shortly after the Inchon landing, a document was retrieved giving Kim Il Sung’s epitaph on the southern fighting: “The original plan was to end the war in a month,” he said, but “we could not stamp out four American divisions.” The units that had captured Seoul disobeyed orders by not marching southward promptly, thereby giving “a breathing spell” to the Americans. From the beginning, “our primary enemy was the American soldiers,” but he acknowledged that “we were taken by surprise when United Nations troops and the American Air Force and Navy moved in.” This suggests that Kim anticipated

the involvement of American ground forces (probably drawn from U.S. troops stationed in Japan), but not in such size, and not with air and naval units—a curious oversight, unless the Koreans thought that Soviet air and naval power would either deter or confront their American counterparts. It would have been hard for anyone, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to imagine that the vast majority of American battle-ready infantry would be transferred around the globe to this small peninsula, of seeming marginal import to U.S. global strategy. The war for the South left 111,000 South Koreans killed, 106,000 wounded, and 57,000 missing; 314,000 homes had been destroyed, 244,000 damaged. American casualties totaled 6,954 dead, 13,659 wounded, and 3,877 missing in action. North Korean military casualties are not known with any certainty, but probably totaled at least 50,000. “A GLUTOF CHINAMEN”: THE MARCH NORTH The American-led forces might have reestablished the 38th parallel and called the war a success for the containment doctrine. It would have been a surgically precise intervention, short but arduous, a sweet and telling defeat for the Communists and clear evidence of American credibility. No one could ever have taken this victory away from Harry Truman. But as the war proceeded during the summer, nearly all of Truman’s high advisers decided that the chance had come not only to contain Communist aggression, but to roll it back. Truman approved a march north toward the end of August; the evidence is clear that the decision to invade the North was made in Washington, not in Tokyo. The historian D. Clayton James remarked that this decision “must rank in quixotism with the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961,” but he thinks it resulted from “groupthink” in Washington. Not so: it was the logical follow-on to the debate over containment and rollback bubbling along in the Truman administration for more than a year. But James is right that civilian centrality—Acheson’s centrality—in the key decisions, first to defend the South and then to invade the North, separated Korea dramatically from the shared and collegial civil-military decision making of World War II. 21

The decision was embodied in NSC document number 81, written mostly by Dean Rusk, which authorized MacArthur to move into North Korea if there were no Soviet or Chinese threats to intervene. It explicitly called for “a roll-back” of the North Korean regime; war dispatches routinely referred to the “liberated areas” in the North. At first he was told to use only Korean units in operations near the Chinese border, but soon the JCS told MacArthur to feel unhindered. MacArthur was correct in telling senators in 1951 that the crossing of the parallel “had the most complete and absolute approval of every section of the American government,” if we grant him the license of mild exaggeration owed to a person who had been badly blindsided by Truman-aligned reconstructions of history. Kim Il Sung crossed the five-year-old 38th parallel, not an international boundary like that between Iraq and Kuwait, or Germany and Poland; instead it bisected a nation that had a rare and well-recognized unitary existence going back to antiquity. The counter-logic implied by saying “Koreans invade Korea” disrupts the received wisdom or renders a logical reconstruction of the official American position impossible. In the most influential American book on justice in war, Michael Walzer defends the Truman administration’s initial intervention with the following argument: the U.S. response to North Korean aggression was correct because Truman took the problem to the United Nations, which was the legitimate organ of world decision and opinion, and thus global justice (“it was the crime of the aggressor to challenge individual and communal rights”). In justifying the American invasion of North Korea, however, the U.S. ambassador to the UN called the 38th parallel “an imaginary line.” Walzer then comments, “I will leave aside the odd notion that the 38th parallel was an imaginary line (how then did we recognize the initial aggression?).” Walzer bypasses this mouthful without further thought, because it is the essence of his argument that Truman was right to defend the 38th parallel as an international boundary—that was “the initial aggression.” 22 Why is it aggression when Koreans cross the 38th parallel, but imaginary when Americans do the same thing?

CHINA IS NEAR In September and October the general conclusion of all American intelligence agencies was that China would not come into the war. On September 20 the CIA envisioned the possibility that Chinese “volunteers” might enter the fighting, and a month later it noted “a number of reports” that Manchurian units might be sent to Korea. However, “the odds are that Communist China, like the USSR, will not openly intervene in North Korea.” On November 1, Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, director of the CIA, accurately wrote that the Chinese “probably genuinely fear an invasion of Manchuria,” and that they would seek to establish a cordon sanitaire for border security “regardless of the increased risk of general war.” But on November 24 as MacArthur lunged toward the Yalu River border, the CIA still found insufficient evidence to suggest a Chinese plan for “major offensive operations.” Intelligence agencies did not lack information; instead the problem resided at the level of assumptions and presuppositions: Moscow wouldn’t intervene because it would fear global war; Beijing wouldn’t either, because Moscow dictated to its leaders. The Russians and the Chinese had a division of labor before the war started: Russian military advisers were in North Korea and Chinese military advisers were in North Vietnam in 1950. Both worked with the respective armies on strategic planning, logistics, army organization, and political controls. While the Koreans prepared their invasion, the Vietnamese “were planning a full-scale assault on the French forces along the Sino-Vietnamese border.”23 This was less a conscious or planned division of labor than a result of Soviet occupation of North Korea and Chinese occupation of northern Vietnam after World War II, and connections between Mao and Ho Chi Minh during the Yanan period. A Chinese military intelligence group arrived in Pyongyang within three weeks of the war’s start, and as early as August 4 Mao considered intervening in Korea: if the Americans were to invade the North “we must therefore come to [North] Korea’s aid and intervene in the name of a volunteer army.” Around the time of the Inchon landing a high North Korean officer, Pak Il-yu, requested Chinese military assistance, and then on October 1 Kim Il Sung held an

emergency meeting with the Chinese ambassador to plead that the PLA 13th Army Corps quickly cross the Yalu River. By then Chinese intervention was certain, the only question was the timing: on September 30 Mao told Stalin “we have decided” to send as many as twelve infantry divisions. The Kremlin, however, fretted that a big Chinese offensive against the Americans might precipitate a world war, and backed off from a previous commitment to provide airpower to protect China’s coasts. China went ahead regardless, which apparently surprised Stalin.24 North Korean and Chinese documents make clear that China did not enter the war purely as a defensive measure to protect its border, as has long been known, but also because Mao determined early in the war that should the North Koreans falter, China had an obligation to come to their aid because of the sacrifice of so many Koreans in the Chinese revolution, the anti-Japanese resistance, and the Chinese civil war. The PRC’s Foreign Affairs Ministry referred to China’s obligations to “the Korean people who have stood on our side during the past decades.” The October 1 crossing of the 38th parallel caused Mao a sleepless night, but he made the lone decision to intervene, and informed Stalin of his decision the next day. As if some telepathy were at work, MacArthur told the Department of the Army on the same day that “the field of our military operations is limited only by military exigencies and the international boundaries of Korea. The so-called 38th Parallel, accordingly, is not a factor.” 25 In other words, NSC 81, the rollback strategy itself, caused the Chinese intervention, and not the subsequent arrival of American troops at the Yalu River. Chinese forces attacked in late October, bloodied many American troops, and then disappeared. It is likely that the Chinese hoped this would suffice to stop the American march to the Yalu, perhaps at the narrow neck of the peninsula above Pyongyang. But this also would leave the DPRK as a small, rump regime. Around this time Kim Il Sung arrived in Beijing on an armored train, moving under cover of darkness and blanketed security. He was accompanied by three other uniformed Koreans, and China’s northeast leader, Kao Kang. High PRC leaders, including Chou En-lai and Nieh Jung-chen (the two besides Mao most closely linked to the Korean decision), were not seen in Beijing in the same period, reappearing for the funeral of Jen Pi-shih on October 27.26 But the

Americans resumed their advance, as did the North Korean–Chinese strategy of luring them deep into the interior of North Korea, thus to stretch their supply lines, wait for winter, and gain time for a dramatic reversal on the battlefield. MacArthur and his G-2 chief, Charles Willoughby, trusted only themselves, and had an intuitive approach to intelligence that mingled the hard facts of enemy capability with hunches about the enemy’s presumed ethnic and racial qualities (“Chinamen can’t fight”). This combined with MacArthur’s “personal infallibility theory of intelligence,” in which he “created his own intelligence organization, interpreted its results and acted upon his own analysis.” 27 When the CIA was formed it threatened MacArthur’s exclusive intelligence theater in the Pacific and J. Edgar Hoover’s in Latin America. MacArthur and Willoughby thus continued the “interdiction” that they practiced against the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the Pacific War. Although the CIA did function in Japan and Korea before June 1950, operatives had to either get permission from Willoughby or hide themselves from MacArthur’s G-2 (as well as the enemy target). Effective liaison in the handling of information barely existed. At the late date of March 1950 some minimal cooperation ensued when Gen. J. Lawton Collins of the JCS asked that MacArthur share with them Willoughby’s reports on China and areas near to it. On Thanksgiving Day (November 23) the troops in the field had turkey dinners with all the trimmings—shrimp cocktail,