Forty-five years after shipping out to fight in
Korea, Harry Summers
got new insight into what the war had been all
about.
By Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr.,
U.S. Army (ret.)
Dismissed as the 'forgotten
war,' Korea was in actuality one of America's
most significant conflicts. Although born of a
misapprehension, the Korean War triggered the buildup
of U.S. forces in the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO), began American involvement in
the Vietnam War, and, although seen as an aberration
at the time, now serves as the very model for
America's wars of the future.
One reason the importance of the
Korean War is not better appreciated is that from the
very start the conflict presented confusing and
contradictory messages. Historian and Korean War
combat veteran T.R. Fehrenbach wrote in his classic
This Kind of War: 'Americans in 1950
rediscovered something that since Hiroshima they had
forgotten: you may fly over a land forever; you may
bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it, and wipe it clean
of life--but if you desire to defend it, protect it,
and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the
ground the way the Roman legions did, by putting your
young men into the mud.'
Fehrenbach concluded: 'By April
1951, the Eighth Army had again proven Erwin
Rommel's assertion that American troops knew less
but learned faster than any fighting men he had
opposed. The tragedy of American arms, however, is
that having an imperfect sense of history, Americans
sometimes forget as quickly as they learn.' Those
words proved to be only too true.
Two years later, as the war came to
an end, Air Force Secretary Thomas K. Finletter
declared that 'Korea was a unique,
never-to-be-repeated diversion from the true course
of strategic air power.' For the next quarter
century, nuclear weaponry dominated U.S. military
strategy. As a result, General Maxwell D. Taylor, the
Eighth Army's last wartime commander (and later
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the
Vietnam War), complained that 'there was no
thoroughgoing analysis ever made of the lessons to be
learned from Korea, and later policy makers proceeded
to repeat many of the same mistakes.'
The most damning mistake those
policy-makers made was to misjudge the true nature of
the war. As Karl von Clausewitz, the renowned
Prussian philosopher of war, wrote in 1832: 'The
first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of
judgment that the statesman and the commander has to
make is to establish...the kind of war on which they
are embarking....This is the first of all strategic
questions and the most important.'
As President Harry S. Truman's
June 27, 1950, war message makes evident, the U.S.
assumption was that monolithic world communism,
directed by Moscow, was behind the North Korean
invasion. 'The attack upon Korea makes it plain
beyond all doubt,' said Truman, 'that
Communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to
conquer independent nations and will now use armed
invasion and war.'
That belief, later revealed as false,
had enormous and far-reaching consequences. Believing
that Korea was a diversion and that the main attack
would come in Europe, the United States began a major
expansion of its NATO forces. From 81,000 soldiers
and one infantry division stationed in Western Europe
when the war started, by 1952 the U.S. presence had
increased to six divisions--including the National
Guard's 28th and 43rd Infantry divisions--503
aircraft, 82 warships and 260,800 men, slightly more
than the 238,600 soldiers then in combat in
Korea.
Another critical action was the
decision to become involved in Vietnam. In addition
to ordering U.S. military forces to intervene in
Korea, Truman directed 'acceleration in the
furnishing of military assistance to the forces of
France and the Associated States in Indo-China and
the dispatch of a military mission to provide close
working relations with those forces.'
On September 17, 1950, Military
Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) Indochina was
formed, an organization that would grow to the
half-million-strong Military Assistance Command
Vietnam (MACV) before U.S. involvement in that
country came to an end almost a quarter century
later. As in Korea, the notion that monolithic world
communism was behind the struggle persisted until
almost the very end.
The fact that such an assumption was
belied by 2,000 years of Sino-Vietnamese hostility
was ignored, and it was not until Richard Nixon's
diplomatic initiatives in 1970 that the United States
became aware of, and began to exploit, the fissures
in that so-called Communist monolith. By then it was
too late, for the American people had long since
given up on Vietnam.
The fact that the U.S. response to
both the Korean War and the Vietnam War was built on
the false perception of a Communist monolith began to
emerge after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in
December 1991. At a July 1995 conference I attended
at Georgetown University, Dr. Valeri Denissov, deputy
director of the Asian Department of the Russian
Foreign Ministry, revealed the true nature of the
Korean War's origins.
Drawing from the hitherto secret
documents of the Soviet Foreign Ministry, Denissov
revealed that far from being the instigator of the
war, Soviet Premier Josef Stalin was at best a
reluctant partner. In September 1949, the Politburo
of the Soviet Communist Party rejected an appeal from
North Korea's Kim Il Sung to assist in an
invasion of the South. But in April 1950, says
Denissov, Stalin changed his mind and agreed to
provide assistance for an invasion of the South. For
one thing, Kim had convinced Stalin that the invasion
was a low-risk operation that could be successfully
concluded before the United States could
intervene.
'Thus,' said Denissov,
'the documents existing in Russian archives prove
that...it was Kim Il Sung who unleashed the war upon
receiving before-hand blessings from Stalin and Mao
Zedong [Mao Tse-tung].'
Why did Stalin change his mind? The
first reason lay in Mao Tse-tung's victory in the
Chinese Third Civil War. Denissov asserted that
'Stalin believed that after the U.S.A. deserted
Chiang Kai-shek 'to his own fortunes' in the
internal Chinese conflict they would not risk a
participation in a Korean-Korean war as well.'
Another factor, Denissov believed, was that 'the
Soviet Union had declared the creation of its own
nuclear bomb, which according to Stalin's
calculations deprived Americans of their nuclear
monopoly and of their ability to use the 'nuclear
card' in the confrontation with the Soviet
Union.'
Another Russian Foreign Ministry
official at the conference, Dr. Evgeny Bajanov, added
yet another reason for Stalin's change of
heart--the 'perceived weakness of
Washington's position and of its will to get
involved militarily in Asia.'
That perception was well-founded.
Dispatched to Korea at the end of World War II to
disarm the Japanese there, the U.S. military was not
too fond of the country from the start. When I
arrived at the replacement depot at Yongdungpo in
November 1947, our group was addressed by Lt. Gen.
John R. Hodge, commander of the XXIV Corps and of
U.S. forces in Korea. 'There are only three
things the troops in Japan are afraid of,' he
said. 'They're gonorrhea, diarrhea and Korea.
And you've got the last one.'
After a year with the 6th Infantry
Division in Pusan--a time spent mostly confined to
barracks because of the civil unrest then sweeping
the country--I was only too glad to see the division
deactivated in December 1948 and myself transferred
to the 24th Infantry Division in Japan. In 1949, the
7th Infantry Division, the only remaining U.S. combat
unit in Korea, was also transferred to Japan, leaving
only the several hundred men of the Korean Military
Advisory Group (KMAG).
'In Moscow,' Denissov said,
'American military presence in South Korea in
1945-1949 was viewed as a 'deterring factor'
which became defunct after America's withdrawal
from the South.' Yet another sign of lack of
American will was Secretary of State Dean
Acheson's public statement in January 1950 that
Korea was outside the U.S. defense perimeter in Asia.
Finally, Moscow must have been well aware of the
drastic cuts made in America's defenses by the
false economies of Truman and Louis Johnson, his
feckless secretary of defense.
While Stalin's and Kim Il
Sung's perceptions of U.S. lack of resolve may
have been well-founded, they were also wrong. During
a Pentagon briefing in 1974, General Vernon Walters,
then deputy director of the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), was asked about the unpredictability of
U.S. reaction. 'If a Soviet KGB spy had broken
into the Pentagon or the State Department on June 25,
1950, and gained access to our most secret
files,' Walters said, 'he would have found
the U.S. had no interest at all in Korea. But the one
place he couldn't break into was the mind of
Harry Truman, and two days later America went to war
over Korea.'
In taking the United States to war in
Korea, Truman made two critical decisions that would
shape future military actions. First, he decided to
fight the war under the auspices of the United
Nations, a pattern followed by President George Bush
in the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and, currently, by
President Bill Clinton in Bosnia. Second, for the
first time in American military history, Truman
decided to take the nation to war without first
asking Congress for a declaration of war. Using the
U.N. Security Council resolution as his authority, he
said the conflict in Korea was not a war but a
'police action.'
With the Soviet Union then boycotting
the U.N. Security Council, the United States was able
to gain approval of U.N. resolutions labeling the
North Korean invasion a 'breach of the peace'
and urging all members to aid South Korea.
The United States was named executive
agent for the conduct of the war, and on July 10,
1950, Truman appointed General of the Army Douglas
MacArthur as commander in chief of the U.N. Command.
In reality, however, the U.N. involvement was a
facade for unilateral U.S. action to protect its
vital interests in northeast Asia. The U.N. Command
was just another name for MacArthur's Far East
Command in Tokyo.
At its peak strength in July 1953,
the U.N. Command stood at 932,539 ground forces.
Republic of Korea (ROK) army and marine forces
accounted for 590,911 of that force, and U.S. Army
and Marine forces for another 302,483. By comparison,
other U.N. ground forces totaled some 39,145 men,
24,085 of whom were provided by British Commonwealth
Forces (Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New
Zealand) and 5,455 of whom came from Turkey.
While the U.N. facade was a harmless
delusion, Truman's decision not to seek a
declaration of war set a dangerous precedent.
Claiming their war making authority rested in their
power as commanders in chief, both Presidents Lyndon
B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon refused to ask
Congress for approval to wage war in Vietnam, a major
factor in undermining support for that conflict. It
was not until the Gulf War in 1991 that then
President Bush rejected suggestions that he follow
the Korean precedent and instead, as the Constitution
provides, asked Congress for permission to wage
war.
All those political machinations,
however, were far from the minds of those of us then
on occupation duty in Japan. We were as surprised as
Stalin and Kim Il Sung at Truman's orders to go
into action in Korea. For one thing, we were far from
ready. I was then a corporal with the 24th Infantry
Division's heavy tank battalion, only one company
of which was activated--and that unit was equipped
not with heavy tanks but with M-24 Chaffee light
reconnaissance tanks, armed with low-velocity 75mm
guns, that proved to be no match for the North
Koreans' Soviet-supplied T-34 85mm-gun medium
tanks.
Also inadequate were the
infantry's 2.36-inch anti-tank rocket launchers.
Radios did not work properly, and we were critically
short of spare parts. Instead of the usual three
rifle battalions, the infantry regiments had only
two. And our field artillery battalions had only two
of their three authorized firing batteries. Although
our officers and sergeants were mostly World War II
combat veterans, we were truly a 'hollow
force.'
The 24th Infantry Division was the
first U.S. ground combat unit committed to the war,
with its initial elements landing in Korea on July 1,
1950. We soon found ourselves outgunned by the
advancing North Korean People's Army (NKPA). All
of our tanks were lost to the NKPA T-34s, and our
commander was killed for want of a starter solenoid
on our tank retriever. Going into action with some
16,000 soldiers, the 24th Division had only 8,660 men
left by the time it was relieved by the 1st Cavalry
Division on July 22.
The shock of those initial disasters
still reverberates throughout the U.S. Army more than
four decades later. After the end of the Cold War in
1991, the watchwords of Army Chief of Staff General
Gordon Sullivan were 'Remember Task Force
Smith,' a warning not to let the Army again
become the hollow force of 1950 that paid in blood
for America's unpreparedness.
Task Force Smith was the first of the
24th Infantry Division's units to be committed.
Named after its commander, Lt. Col. Charles B.
'Brad' Smith, the task force consisted of the
1st Battalion, 21st Infantry, and 'A'
Battery, 52nd Field Artillery Battalion. The task
force came under attack by the infantry columns of
the NKPA 4th Infantry Division and the T-34s of the
209th Armored Brigade at Osan on July 5, 1950.
Outnumbered and unable to stop the NKPA tanks, it was
forced to fall back toward Taejon. There, the
remainder of the 24th Infantry Division made a stand
until July 20, before being pushed back into the
Naktong Perimeter--losing the commander, Maj. Gen.
William F. Dean (captured by the NKPA), in the
process. Although at a terrible price, it had bought
time for the remainder of the Eighth U.S. Army (EUSA)
to move from Japan to Korea. Contrary to Kim Il
Sung's calculations, America had been able to
intervene in time. North Korea's attempt to
conquer South Korea in one lightning stroke had been
thwarted.
Wars are fought on three
interconnected levels. At first, the United States
was on the operational (i.e., theater of war) and
tactical (i.e., battlefield) defensive, but at the
strategic (i.e., national policy) level, it was still
pursuing the same policy of 'rollback and
liberation' that it had followed in earlier wars.
That policy called for temporarily going on the
defensive to buy time to prepare for a strategic
offensive that would carry the war to the enemy in
order to destroy his will to resist.
While EUSA held the Naktong River
line against a series of North Korean assaults,
General MacArthur laid plans to assume the strategic,
operational and tactical offensive with a landing
behind enemy lines at Inchon.
In a brilliant strategic maneuver,
MacArthur sent his X Corps ashore on September 15,
1950. Consisting of the Army's 7th Infantry
Division and the Marine 1st Division, it rapidly cut
the enemy's lines of supply and communication to
its forces besieging the Naktong Perimeter to the
south, forcing them to withdraw in disarray. While X
Corps pressed on to recapture Seoul, South
Korea's capital city, EUSA broke out of the
Naktong Perimeter and linked up with X Corps near
Osan on September 26. Seoul fell the next day.
'After the Inchon landing,'
Secretary of State Acheson told the Senate in May
1951, 'General MacArthur called on these North
Koreans to turn in their arms and cease their
efforts; that they refused to do, and they retired
into the North, and what General MacArthur's
military mission was, was to pursue them and round
them up [and] we had the highest hopes that when you
did that the whole of Korea would be
unified.'
On Korea's western coast, EUSA
crossed the 38th parallel dividing North and South
Korea and captured the North Korean capital of
Pyongyang on October 19, 1950. EUSA continued to
drive north against light opposition, and on November
1, 1950, it reached its high-water mark when the
village of Chongdo-do, 18 air miles from the Yalu
River separating Korea and the Chinese province of
Manchuria, was captured by the 21st Infantry
Regiment.
Meanwhile, on the opposite coast, X
Corps had moved into northeastern Korea. The 1st
Marine Division occupied positions around the Chosin
Reservoir, while on November 21, elements of the
Army's 7th Infantry Division's 17th Infantry
Regiment reached the Yalu River near its source at
Hyesanjin in eastern Korea. It seemed as though the
war was over.
But disaster was at hand. On October
4, 1950, Chairman Mao Tse-tung had secretly ordered
'Chinese People's Volunteers' into action
in Korea. Those Chinese Communist Forces (CCF)
consisted of some 380,000 soldiers, organized into
two army groups, nine corps-size field armies and 30
infantry divisions.
From October 13 to 25, the
130,000-man CCF XIII Army Group covertly crossed the
Yalu River in the western sector opposite EUSA. Two
weeks later, the 120,000-man CCF IX Army Group also
moved surreptitiously into the eastern sector in
Korea, opposite X Corps. Because of intelligence
failures, both in Washington and in Korea, the
Chinese managed to achieve almost total surprise.
Their intervention would change not only the
battlefield conduct of the war but also its strategic
nature.
According to the Soviet archives, in
May 1950, Mao had agreed to join with the Soviet
Union and support the North Korean invasion of South
Korea. As the Russian Foreign Ministry's Evgeny
Bajanov noted at the 1995 Georgetown conference,
Chinese Foreign Minister Chou En-lai 'confirmed
[on July 2, 1950] that if the Americans crossed the
38th parallel, Chinese troops disguised as Koreans
would engage the opponent' and that Chinese
armies had already been concentrated in the area of
Mukden in Manchuria. 'In August-September 1950 on
a number of occasions,' said Bajanov, 'Mao
personally expressed concerns over the escalation of
American military intervention in Korea and
reiterated the readiness of Beijing to send troops to
the Korean peninsula 'to mince' American
divisions.' But when Stalin sent a message to Mao
on October 1, asking him to 'come to the rescue
of the collapsing Kim regime,' Mao refused,
instead suggesting 'the Koreans should accept
defeat and resort to guerrilla tactics.'
Under intense Soviet pressure,
however, on October 13, 'the Chinese, after long
deliberation, did agree to extend military aid to
North Korea,' said Bajanov. 'Moscow in
exchange agreed to arm the Chinese troops and provide
them with air cover. According to the available
information, it was not easy for Beijing to adopt
that military decision. Pro-Soviet Gao Gang and Peng
Dehuai [who would later command the CCF in Korea]
finally managed to convince Mao to take their side.
Their main argument was that if all of Korea was
occupied by the Americans, it would create a mortal
danger to the Chinese revolution.'
In any event, after feints in early
November against EUSA at Unsan and against X Corps at
Sudong, both of which were ignored by Far East
Command intelligence officers, the CCF launched its
main attack. On November 25, the XIII Army Group
struck the EUSA, driving it out of North Korea and
retaking Seoul on January 4, 1951. Meanwhile, on
November 27, the CCF IX Army Group struck X Corps,
and by December 25, 1950, had forced its evacuation
from North Korea as well.
At first, both Moscow and Beijing
were elated. On January 8, 1951, Bajanov reported,
Stalin cabled Mao, 'From all my heart I
congratulate Chinese comrades with the capture of
Seoul.' But Bajanov added, 'By the end of
January 1951...the euphoria of Communists started to
decline and quite soon it disappeared and was
replaced with worries, fear, confusion and at times
panic.'
What made the difference was Lt. Gen.
Matthew B. Ridgway, who took command of EUSA on
December 26, 1950, replacing Lt. Gen. Walton H.
Walker, who had been killed in a jeep accident.
Ridgway turned EUSA from dejection and defeat into a
tough, battle-ready force within a matter of weeks.
'The Eighth Army,' wrote Fehrenbach,
'rose from its own ashes in a killing mood....By
7 March they stood on the Han. They went through
Seoul, and reduced it block by block....At the end of
March, the Eighth Army was across the
parallel.'
Attempting to stem that tide, on
April 22, 1951, the CCF launched its great spring
offensive, sending some 250,000 men and 27 divisions
into the attack along a 40-mile front north of Seoul.
It was the largest battle of the war, but by May 20
the CCF, after some initial gains, had been turned
back with terrible losses. As Time magazine
put it, 'The U.S. expended ammunition the way the
Chinese expended men.' After that success, the
United States was in good position to retake the
offensive and sweep the CCF from Korea. But
Washington ordered EUSA to maintain its defensive
posture, for U.S. military policy had changed from
rollback and liberation to containment. That ruled
out battlefield victory, for the best possible result
of defensive operations is stalemate.
On July 10, 1951, armistice talks
began between the U.N. Command and the CCF/NKPA.
After the front line stabilized in November 1951,
along what was to become the new demarcation line,
the fighting over the next 20 months degenerated into
a bloody battle for terrain features like Old Baldy,
Heartbreak Ridge and Pork Chop Hill. The U.S. forces
suffered some 63,200 casualties to gain or retain
those outposts. With victory no longer in sight,
public support for the war plummeted, and in 1952
Truman decided not to run for re-election rather than
risk almost certain defeat. With the signing of the
armistice agreement on July 27, 1953, the war finally
came to an end.
Dwarfed by the total U.S. victory in
World War II, the negotiated settlement in Korea
seemed to many observers to be a defeat and at best a
draw. Certainly it seemed no model for the
future.
As indicated previously, it was
Eisenhower's strategy of massive nuclear
retaliation that dominated the immediate postwar era.
Conventional forces, like the Korean War itself, were
dismissed as irrelevant. Even when the atomic war
strategies were challenged by the John F. Kennedy
administration's policy of flexible response,
conventional forces were still ignored in favor of
the 'new' counterinsurgency war. Vietnam
would be its test case.
The Vietnam War, like the Korean War,
was pursued on the strategic defensive--the United
States still not realizing that the best result
possible was stalemate. In Korea, U.S. forces kept
the external enemy at bay while giving local forces
responsibility for counterguerrilla operations. But
in Vietnam, this strategy--the only one with any hope
of success--was regarded as ineffective, even though
the Korean War objective of preserving South
Korea's independence had been attained.
Only in the wake of an unqualified
failure in Vietnam, where Saigon fell not to
guerrilla attack but to a Korea-style cross-border
blitzkrieg by the North Vietnamese army, did the
limited validity of both nuclear war and
counterinsurgency operations become evident. The most
probable future conflict was still a war fought with
conventional weapons in pursuit of limited political
goals--in short, another Korea.
That was exactly what happened in the
1990-91 Persian Gulf War, and what the Pentagon is
now prepared for with its policy of being able to
fight two regional conflicts almost
simultaneously.
One of those potential regional
conflicts is Korea. As President Bill Clinton told
the Korean National Assembly in July 1993, 'The
Korean peninsula remains a vital American
interest.' As proof of U.S. resolve, almost a
half century after it was decimated at Kunu-ri
protecting EUSA's withdrawal from North Korea,
the 2nd U.S. Infantry Division currently sits astride
the Seoul invasion corridor as a tripwire
guaranteeing certain U.S. involvement in any future
conflict there. *
For further reading, Vietnam
Magazine editor Harry G. Summers, Jr., recommends
his book Korean War Almanac, and In Mortal
Combat, Korea, 19501953, by John
Toland.
