The Korean War: A History (12 page)

Nonetheless this genre exercises a strong influence in the United States, perhaps a subliminal one in that extensive knowledge of the war is not required, perhaps a hegemonic one in that well-known analysts easily perform its logic in a few sentences. Not many writers were better or more perspicacious guides to the George W. Bush administration and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan than Hendrik Hertzberg of
The New Yorker
. He recently wrote that two of our five big wars since 1945 were good ones—Korea and the Gulf War (1991)—because they were “legitimate in their origins” and “scrupulous in their execution.” Both were fought “in response to armed aggression across international borders,” and in both American leaders “resisted powerful political pressures to expand
its objective to include the destruction and conquest of the regime responsible for the original aggression.”
¹⁵
The reader can judge how well these generalizations hold up as this book unfolds.

Acheson’s Press Club speech was the opposite of an ill-considered gaffe: instead it unlocks key aspects of U.S. policy toward Korea before the war. Why did he not include Korea in his perimeter? The best answer is that Acheson “wanted to keep secret the American commitment to Korea’s defense.”
¹⁶
Acheson implied that should an attack come there, the United States would take the problem to the UN Security Council—which is what Dean Rusk had secretly recommended to him nearly a year before the war, in July 1949, and exactly what Acheson did when the war erupted. In the many drafts leading up to this speech, South Korea was consistently seen as a direct American responsibility, along with Japan. But Acheson did not want to say this publicly, lest Syngman Rhee be emboldened to start a war; that is also why he blocked tanks and an air force for the ROK. Interestingly, when the North Koreans commented on this speech they had South Korea
included
in the defense perimeter. Why? Because for weeks there was no official transcript of the speech, and the North Koreans probably read
The New York Times
—which in the Sunday “Week in Review” section after the speech also had Korea included in the defense line. In the end it all worked beautifully for Acheson, who was seeking ambiguity and trying to keep both the Communists and volatile allies such as Syngman Rhee and Chiang Kai-shek guessing about what the United States would do if South Korea or Taiwan were attacked. The British War Office said in a December 1949 estimate that the Northern forces would have little difficulty in winning a war—and “on the question of aggression,” there can be “no doubt whatever that their ultimate object is to overrun the South.” The Americans had thought that the South could defend itself, the War Office said, but recently “they have been coming round to our way of thinking.” This was an accurate reflection of Acheson’s suppositions. As for Stalin, thanks to Kim Philby and other spies he was reading Acheson’s
secrets with his breakfast, and had no reason to pay attention to speeches for public consumption.
¹⁷

The Coldest Winter
is best at examining the major American protagonists, through deftly written portraits: Acheson, Truman, Kennan, MacArthur—and especially “Pinky” MacArthur, his mother. It was the “Age of Acheson,” Halberstam correctly said; he dominated the basic decisions about the war and could do so because he had “a constituency of one”—Harry Truman. Halberstam’s subtle portrait of George Kennan is one of the best in the literature, and explains why he was the only top American leader who understood that invading North Korea was a disastrous idea. He catches MacArthur well, but a bit too perfectly, overestimating his influence. MacArthur made no decision that was central to the war, except his fateful one to split his army corps as they marched into the North. The Inchon landing, which Halberstam presents as “a brilliant, daring gamble” and a total surprise to the North Koreans, was neither: a Pentagon war plan issued in mid-June 1950 prefigured it, and a host of captured documents show Pyongyang knew it was coming by the end of August, if not earlier—but could do little about it.

Halberstam brings into focus the views of many American veterans, whom he clearly enjoyed interviewing about this “puzzling, gray, very distant conflict, a war that went on and on, seemingly without hope or resolution, about which most Americans … preferred to know as little as possible.” It was a war, he thought, “orphaned by history.” True in the 1950s perhaps, but a full shelf of books by historians in the United States and around the world reclaimed it decades ago. Had Halberstam read this work seriously, he could not have written
The Coldest Winter
. Had someone written a book like this about the Vietnam War, he would have been the first to criticize it. Rather, his book illustrates the war’s impact on a particular generation, those too young for World War II, in school while Korea raged, and professionally engaged by the time Vietnam became an issue. In the same way that no archival document could
ever convince me of Richard Nixon’s essential goodness, no historian was going to tell David Halberstam that Dean Acheson and Harry Truman were not the good guys, and MacArthur not the author of the war’s essential failure. Halberstam ends Part I with this from Acheson: “We sat around like paralyzed rabbits while MacArthur carried out this nightmare.” Here we witness nothing more than the brilliance of Acheson’s ventriloquy and dissembling.

Melvin Horwitz was a bright young doctor assigned to a MASH unit near the front in 1951–52, and his loving letters to his wife reflect his complicated experience. His original image of the Far East, formed by Hollywood movies, was about places “where terrorists lurked in dark shadowed alleys.” Korea existed somewhere between an occupied Japan that he could enjoy and appreciate, and American stereotypes of Chinese laundrymen (“Boysan, boysan, makee with rubber,” he wrote about some sandals; the
san
honorific is, of course, Japanese). Like most other Americans in the last two years of the war, his contacts with Koreans were minimal—houseboys employed full-time for $2.25 a month, maids, wounded ROK soldiers muted by the language barrier. He rode through the countryside like a tourist, enjoying the beauty of the mountains and rice paddies, and the glint of red pepper drying on golden thatched roofs. The one city that escaped the war, Pusan, was for him a nightmare of refugees, gangs of ragged children and kids pimping (“Me pimpo … nice girl. Blow job.”). Like most of the soldiers he knew, he fought in a war “that no one really believes in,” especially the “pain and death” along a front that rarely moved more than a few miles. Syngman Rhee, the George Washington of Korea to American politicians, was “a tyrant and as fascistic as Chiang.” Korea was “yet one more war that shouldn’t have happened.”
¹⁸
Salter, Roth, Halberstam, and Horwitz are markers for a generation that will pass away (like the rest of us), and after that no American will again bury this distant war in the nostalgia of young men and their formative experiences.

Gregory Henderson was one of the very few among the millions
of Americans to have served in Korea both before and during the war (six million in the war years alone
¹⁹
) to have been moved by the country, to learn the language and culture, to have made of it a second home—first as a diplomat, then as a scholar. His
Politics of the Vortex
remains one of the best books on twentieth-century Korea, and it is particularly acute on those years he himself experienced. Everyone knew everyone else in Seoul, a city so centralized that it was the core of his “vortex”; Henderson’s job was to get to know the elites even better, on behalf of his country. His eye fell on anomalies that others missed; for example, the Japanese military service of the high command of the ROK Army, the quiet pride they took in having fought for the emperor and remained loyal. (Park Chung Hee served a different emperor, P’u Yi, the titular leader of Manchukuo, from whom Park received a gold watch.) Henderson likened the ROK to the “Southern way of life” in the United States, an apt analogy given the prevalence of landed estates served by multitudes of peasant tenants; if this was hardly Athens, the North was much like its opposite: “steelier, more Spartan, more hardbitten, more ideological and less yielding and opportunistic.”
²⁰

In contrast to the ephemeral traces Korea made on American minds, Ha Jin’s novel
War Trash
rings true on every page, a closely observed and much-pondered experience. An interested, fair, discerning observer—so shocked by what he saw—he embraces the odd mass of humanity clustered in Korea during the war. His protagonist’s unit crossed the Yalu to find empty land, “with at least four-fifths of the houses leveled to the ground.” The farther south they went, even fewer houses remained. The image of a blind woman “in a ruffly white dress” picking through a garbage dump, a toddler strapped to her back, remains with him forever as a sign of human resilience. Even amid the blasted landscape, Korean women
sang songs, sometimes for hours in the evening, and remained so fond of cosmetics that most had a pouch of stuff to make up their faces (few Chinese women over forty bother with wearing skirts, let alone makeup). He came upon a prison camp holding hundreds of women guerrillas; women sang there, too; “their voices transported me into reveries.” He noticed that Chinese and North Korean soldiers paid for what they took from civilians, whereas South Korean troops just took. How is it that a Chinese foot soldier sees these things, but Americans apparently didn’t? Then after he was captured, he wondered why American doctors and nurses were so kind to him.
²¹

Ha Jin re-creates fictionally the notorious episode when North Korean POWs captured Brig. Gen. Francis T. Dodd on May 8, 1952, during riots on Koje Island. North Koreans in the camps looked more like highly organized militias than POWs, Ha Jin thought; women were their communication channel to guerrillas on the island and to their superiors in the North. A Korean People’s Army colonel named Lee had fought for many years against the Japanese in Manchukuo, and spoke fluent Chinese; he and others explained that Kim Il Sung had ordered them to open “a second front” inside the camps. The POWs spit out bitterness at General Dodd: Why did American soldiers make North Korean soldiers strip naked after their capture? Why did their jets erase villages? After Dodd was released, American forces used flamethrowers to retake the camp, leaving seventy-seven dead among the POWs.
²²

In 1987 I was able to interview Pak Chang-uk in Pyongyang, a double-amputee who rose from his chair to a standing position by throwing his trunk forward and leveraging his wooden legs under his weight; he provided a blow-by-blow description of the Dodd capture and the subduing of North Korean POWs in Camp 76, in a presentation so striking that he seemed ready to fight it all out again. After the war he sired three daughters and a son, the eldest daughter an architect and the son a railway engineer.

T
he Korean War is an unknown war because it transpired during the height of the McCarthy era (Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were indicted when the war began and executed just before it ended), making open inquiry and citizen dissent improbable. This home front was a repressed but also fascinating place, with Hollywood films that replayed the script of World War II in Korea, weekly magazines with articles and photos that documented a new and very different kind of war (anticipating Vietnam), and shocking stories that threatened and frightened all Americans (not unlike the period since 9/11): a menacing Communist bloc unified from Berlin to Canton, crushing and incomprehensible defeats on the battlefield, fiendish “brainwashing,” and the astounding defection to communism of twenty-one Americans at the end of the war (all of whom ended up in China, and nearly all of whom eventually returned to the United States).

The known and observed Korean War occurred in the first six months, when some 270 journalists from nineteen countries followed the troops and the shifting battle lines, and sent mostly uncensored dispatches to their editors.
¹
They instantly understood this to be a very different war from the global conflagration that ended five years earlier—and that most of them had also covered. It was obviously a smaller and more restricted war (“the limited war” was its name before Vietnam came along), but it was also something novel: a civil war, a people’s war. The best of them was Reginald Thompson, an experienced British journalist who had reported on every important war of the twentieth century to that point and who covered Korea before censorship began. Honest, inquiring, investigative, confident in the truth seen by his own eyes, willing to say
what he thought—he was what one wants in a war correspondent. Thompson’s
Cry Korea
is the only Western book of the Korean War that can be compared to the classics of the Chinese civil war such as Graham Peck’s
Two Kinds of Time
or Jack Belden’s
China Shakes the World
. But another eyewitness account is almost as interesting: Gen. William F. Dean wandered around the hills near Taejon for more than a month after losing that battle, and then spent three years in a North Korean prison camp. His candid and thoughtful observations offer very little grist for the Cold War mill of Communist evil and free-world virtue. Instead both of them opened a window to eyewitness truth.