The Korean War (20 page)

For some days, such was the silence from the far bank of the river that they doubted whether the enemy was there. From time to time, without warning the darkness was broken by a casual incoming shell. There were constant rumours of imminent enemy attack: ‘I used to pray for the dawn,’ said Willoughby. ‘That first grey in the sky was very important there.’

For many South Koreans, the process of discovering the meaning of communist liberation was extended through the four months that Kim Il Sung’s army occupied their country. It is difficult to overemphasise the importance of this period in the subsequent history of Korea. In the years between 1945 and 1950, many of those living under the regime of Syngman Rhee were dismayed and disgusted by the corruption and injustice that the old President came to represent. For all the rumours filtering down from the North, about land reform and political education, there seemed no
reason to imagine that life under Kim Il Sung was any worse than under Syngman Rhee. The two vicious totalitarians appeared to have much in common. Even when the invasion came in June 1950, in the words of the young bank clerk’s son Minh Pyong Kyu, ‘we still did not realise that this was a catastrophe for us.’
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Syngman Rhee’s creatures conducted some odious killings of alleged communist sympathisers as they fled south. Yet the behaviour of the North Koreans in their four months of dominance of the South, their ghastly brutalities and wholesale murders of their enemies, decisively persuaded most inhabitants of the country that whatever the shortcomings of Syngman Rhee, nothing could be as appalling as communist tyranny. In 1950 and in the years that followed, some distinguished Western journalists such as the British James Cameron were so disgusted by the excesses of Rhee’s lackeys that they became opponents of the UN presence in Korea. Not a few UN soldiers were appalled by the acts they witnessed, committed by South Korean soldiers and police. Yet the attitude of such observers as Cameron reflected a Western liberal conscience that shrank from facing the relative moral issues that Korea posited. Something will be said below about the crimes of Syngman Rhee’s minions. But to this day, not a shred of evidence has been discovered of crimes by the Seoul regime on the scale which the North Koreans committed during their rule in the South: the awful mass murders, of which the 5,000 bodies discovered in Taejon alone were only a sample. The UN Command later estimated that some 26,000 South Korean civilians were slaughtered in cold blood by the North Koreans between June and September 1950. The arrival of the communists unleashed a reign of terror, which gave the United Nations’ cause in Korea a moral legitimacy that has survived to this day.

Young Minh Pyong Kyu and his family lived near the West Gate prison in Seoul. They watched the arriving communist army unloose its doors, spilling out into the streets thousands of captives,
common criminals and political prisoners who ran forth yelling, ‘Long Live the Fatherland!’ Minh said: ‘In the beginning, it was an atmosphere of unrestrained happiness, of true liberation. Everybody was running through the streets, leaping for joy.’ Minh’s family found themselves penniless. But they had relations in the country. His father decided to travel to visit them with his younger brothers, in the hope of getting food. Minh himself went back to his medical school. He found most of the teachers still in residence, having declared decisively for the cause of socialism. Minh and other students who had been expelled for political activity were readmitted. But there were no classes. Only the hospital was functioning, under North Korean military supervision. Minh was impressed by the communists’ tough discipline. They kept themselves to themselves, they committed no excesses. ‘Then, in the days that followed, we heard that the communists were rounding up “reactionaries”. Slowly, the atmosphere of terror set in.’

Kap Chong Chi, a twenty-two-year-old student, knew from the beginning that as the son of a landowner, his position and that of his family were perilous. He spent the night after the communist seizure of Seoul deep in thought about what he should do. He had still reached no decision the next morning, when he walked out into the street to see the bodies of two policemen, their identity cards laid neatly upon their chests. Yet foolishly, he went to the house of a friend in the police force, to ask his advice. The man had gone, but two strangers carrying rifles stopped Kap by the door, and demanded to know who he was. His answers did not satisfy them. He was taken away to police headquarters near the Capitol building, and held alone with his fear all that day and night. Early the next morning, he was marched through the courtyard, past the bodies of men already executed, and taken up to the third floor. He joined a long procession of men and women awaiting interrogation, their wrists tied together with strips of cloth. After an endless, wretched wait, he found himself before the People’s Court. The judges, in white civilian clothes, were
themselves newly released from Syngman Rhee’s prisons. To his dismay, he identified one as an acquaintance of his older brother. This man said: ‘I know your family. Landowners. Your life is finished.’ Kap was taken away to join some thirty others, mostly South Korean soldiers or policemen, in a basement cell.

The captives said little to each other through the hours and days that followed, each one fearful of willing his own death by identification with another. A succession of different communist officials took their names and asked further questions. Kap, in desperation, tried a new tactic. He told his interrogators that, like his cousin, he had always been a secret sympathiser. His answers to new, probing questions about his communist convictions sounded pathetically unconvincing. But one of his interrogators proved surprisingly sympathetic. He prompted Kap with some ideological answers. At last, at 4 a.m., five days after his arrest, this official gave him a chit to present to the desk officer responsible for the prisoners.

The little student suffered a further agonising delay in the central hall of the headquarters building, sitting amid a throng of officials, guards and prisoners coming and going, while his papers were processed. He shrank against the wall, hiding his face, terrified of being identified by a new denunciator. But at last, he was casually told that he might go. He walked home through the early morning Seoul streets, decked with huge posters of Stalin and Kim Il Sung. For a few hours he hid, listening to Voice of America, desperate to discover what was happening in the south of the country. Then, ravenously hungry, he went to the house of a fellow-student. He found his friend in the same case as himself. They discussed what to do. No young man could leave the city, yet somehow they must. They considered stealing a boat, rowing out to the American fleet. They lingered for days, not daring to venture on to the streets. Only when they became convinced that if they remained, they must face rearrest, did they summon up the courage to join the great throng of refugees crowding the approaches to the improvised ferry crossings south across the Han
river. They had forged themselves crude passes to get past the communist checkpoints. In the confusion at the river, they bluffed their way through.

Like hundreds of thousands of Koreans in those days, they walked for weeks, hither and thither amid the communist troop columns and incessant American strafing which killed many hundreds of civilians, along with the North Koreans. They sought in vain to get through to the UN perimeter in the south-east. Despairing of this, they set out for the family home at Kwangju. Kap was arrested again, held overnight, and escaped during a bombing raid. From a friend outside Kwangju, he heard that all his family had been arrested, and were believed to be dead. Kap could think of nowhere else to go: ‘I began to travel aimlessly, merely waiting for something to happen.’
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Thousands, even millions of South Koreans lived on the brink of animality in those months, roaming the countryside; fighting off fellow-strugglers for survival with increasingly ruthless desperation; existing partly on peasant charity, but more generally by plundering the fields of whatever crops and scraps and domestic animals they could reach in darkness. Suk Bun Yoon was a thirteen-year-old middle school pupil, the son of a Seoul merchant. Many of his fellow-students, urged by their teachers to volunteer for Kim Il Sung’s army, did so. But Suk’s father knew that sooner or later, the communists would find his name on the rolls of several Rhee sponsored political organisations. The family hid in their home for weeks while Suk and his younger brothers walked out into the countryside to buy food, each trip a longer search becoming necessary, sometimes twenty, thirty, forty miles; then they struggled back to the city. One day, Suk was stopped on the road and pressed into joining an army forced-labour group, humping ammunition. It took the boy twelve hours to carry his huge load six miles to the station where it was wanted. Then he was detained to dig slit trenches, a task interrupted by repeated flights to a nearby sewer during air attacks. Once, he found himself within a few yards of a bridge which blew up before his eyes, beneath the
bombs of a B-26. At last, he was able to slip away, and walk home to the city. He found that his father had gone, seeking refuge in the countryside. The rest of the family lingered in the house, exhausted by hunger and fear. They could think of nowhere to go, but they knew that if they remained, sooner or later the communists must come for them. They prayed for a miracle.

There are those who might argue that the families of such young men as Suk Bun Yoon or Kap Chong Chi had willed their own misery, by their support for the regime of Syngman Rhee; that their own terrors at the hands of the communists were matched by those of left-wing sympathisers in the hands of Rhee’s police in the years that went before. Yet if Rhee’s regime had been a relative tyranny, that of Kim Il Sung proved absolute. There are no more striking testimonials to the political development of Korea at war than those of such young men as Minh Pyong Kyu, who were avowed left-wing sympathisers before the North Korean invasion; yet who abruptly ceased to be so, when they saw the manner in which the regime of Kim Il Sung exercised its power.

The men of Eighth Army strung out along the mountains above the Naktong were entirely ignorant of the terrors and nightmares of many South Koreans at the hands of their occupiers. They could measure something of the reluctance of thousands of people to join the ranks of Kim Il Sung by the vast drift of refugees into the Perimeter. But the Americans had come to this war too speedily to have any chance of indoctrination about its higher purposes, and their cause still lacked any remotely grand grievance in the manner of Pearl Harbor. They were told that they were fighting Asian communism at the gates of the Pacific. Most were only aware of the desperate need to survive against the cluster of ‘gooks’ working up the defile below them, the T-34 grinding down the road towards their position. The struggle for the Pusan Perimeter only attained its historical coherence to those who wrote about it afterwards. In those autumn weeks of 1950, it was an interminable series of
short, fierce, encounter battles in which the defenders’ units had known each other, had fought together, for too brief a period to be called an army in any meaningful sense.

There was no point where the line began [wrote the British correspondent James Cameron], because naturally there was no line – except at rear on the briefing-room map; a doubtful chalk-mark between established positions; it had no meaning on the ground. What line there was, was this road, winding up from security in Taegu northwards into the hills until it stopped, only for fear of its own length. A mile or two outside town no part of it was safe; you would meet nothing on the road, but the hillsides were full of invisible people, and when you turned back along the track there would be a barrier between you and your rear. It might be only a machine-gun roadblock, but for a while it would dislocate the whole crawling vertebrae of the column, which could move only in one plane, forwards or back, and never to the side. One drove trying to look behind; the dangerous place was always one corner away, at the back of your head.

Bit by bit the front materialised, the tanks squatted on the flats of the river-beds, the road grew dense with traffic, and soon, where it ran in a kind of cutting between wooded slopes, were the groups of men, like picnickers, crouching on the verge with automatic guns, huddling in the dust of the passing wheels among a litter of ration-cans (‘The Ripe Flavour of Nutty Home-Grown Corn Enriched with Body-Building Viadose’) or heads buried under the hood of a jeep. The air was alive with a tinny whispering from field-telephones and the radios of tanks, a thin erratic chattering like insects, the ceaseless indiscriminate gossip of an army. Up and down the road, weaving through the traffic, bare-legged Koreans humped loads of food or mortar ammunition on their porters’ frameworks of wood, like men with easels on their backs.
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‘In many ways, it seemed a tougher war than Europe,’ said Lieutenant Walt Mayo, an artillery forward observer with the 8th
Cavalry. Mayo had fought as an enlisted draftee with the 106th Division at the Battle of the Bulge.

Things were so disorganised and depressing – I remember going back to the battery and get some clean clothes, to find them evacuating our ammunition dump. We were rationed to twenty-five rounds a tube a day, and one was constantly fighting to get extra rounds – it became a game as to which FOO could lie best to the Fire Direction Officer. There were days when one lay there for hours on end under incoming mortar fire, but could get no rounds at all to send back. You fought for a hilltop; you lost it; you got it back. There was none of that excitement of being on the move. Men were kept going just by a crude feeling of ‘To hell with it, those bastards aren’t going to beat us.’
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