The Korean War (50 page)

It was made even less pretty by such scandals as the creation of the so-called National Defence Corps by the South Korean government in December 1950. This was intended to act as a paramilitary militia. In the months that followed, it became evident to foreigners in Korea that something was going wrong, when they glimpsed bodies of starving beggars in the streets, and when it was learned that thousands of wretched members of the NDC were dying of cold and exposure, kept confined in barracks unfed and deprived of warmth. Even the Seoul government could not indefinitely resist demands for an investigation. It was discovered that the NDC commanding officer, one Kim Yun Gun, had embezzled millions of dollars intended to clothe and feed the militia. He and five of his officers were shot outside Taegu on 12 August 1951. Yet every Allied government knew that this case was only the tip of the iceberg of official corruption.

Throughout the war, Rhee conducted his own dictatorship without reference to Allied sensibilities, almost indeed as if the war did not exist. The National Assembly fought a long series of political battles with him, and lost all of them. The last, and most dramatic, came in May 1952, when the Assembly voted to overrule Rhee and lift martial law in the Pusan district. On 27 May, the Assembly building was surrounded by military police. Some 50 Assemblymen in shuttle buses were towed by army trucks to a military police station. Four were jailed, although their arrest in mid-session was blatantly illegal. Rhee then wielded power as if the legislature did not exist. ‘Spontaneous’ demonstrations were organised in his support. Coercion of the anti-Rhee Assemblymen became outrageous.
At midnight on 4 July, eighty were dragged into the Assembly hall under police guard to prevent their escape. None were allowed to leave until constitutional amendments had been passed, placing all effective power in South Korea in Rhee’s hands. Thus armed, he called a presidential election on 5 August, at which he was declared elected with 72 per cent of the vote. Thereafter, official corruption in Korea ran entirely unchecked, and meaningful political debate was at an end. The United States and her allies were deeply embarrassed. Rhee made it plain that he could not care less.

Captain Ves Kauffroth arrived in Korea in December 1950 from New Orleans, to serve as an air traffic controller. Driving towards Kimpo, ‘the truck was stopped by Korean police while a procession of Korean prisoners marched across the road directly in front of us. The procession was led by a long line of men wearing pointed, conical hats that even covered their faces. The long lines were four abreast and were followed by women who were also roped together. The women’s heads were not covered, and several looked up to us in the truck in a most beseeching manner as they were dragged along. I asked the driver what was happening, and he said they were communists being taken away for execution. He said that now the Chinese had entered the war, all communists were being “gotten rid of”.’
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Here was a pattern that was to become bleakly familiar in Indochina: of two opposing authoritarian regimes, each waging war
à l’outrance
, each committing acts of extraordinary brutality by Western standards. In Seoul, as in Saigon later, it could be argued that the scale of atrocities committed by the anti-communist forces was far less great than that attributable to the communists. Yet nothing could change the fact that the process of law scarcely existed in Seoul, any more than in Pyongyang. The vengeance of Syngman Rhee and his officials upon their perceived enemies was quite as casual and ruthless as that of Kim Il Sung. The communist guerrilla activity in South Korea, which remained a constant feature of life there until the end of the war, required unceasing military activity to contain it, and provided the Seoul regime with an alibi for all
manner of brutalities to its own people, ‘suspected of assisting the enemy’. Western soldiers were struggling to believe that they were fighting in Korea to defend certain principles of justice and freedom, which they witnessed daily being flouted, indeed trampled underfoot, all around them.

Throughout the first year of the war, Washington conducted a tireless diplomatic offensive to broaden to the utmost the participation of foreign contingents in the struggle. If the concept of the war as a United Nations crusade, rather than a narrow pursuit of American national interests, was to remain plausible, the member nations of the UN must be seen to contribute on the battlefield. Yet the very insistence of the Washington Administration that the Korean War must be regarded as one front in the worldwide struggle against communism made many nations reluctant to flock to the standard. It might have been easier to persuade them to fight against North Korean aggression than to participate in a confrontation in which, they were told, Pyongyang was merely acting as the tool of Moscow and Peking. In the first year, the towering shadow of MacArthur, together with his pronouncements, deterred some governments. It was embarrassing enough to be invited to send troops to fight as subordinate partners of the American army. But when there was also serious doubt whether the Washington Administration could control its own theatre commander, when the spectre of a third world war hung heavy over the battlefield, even greater fears came into play. Many nations were still in deep economic difficulties in the aftermath of World War II. Their men in the field had to be clothed, armed, equipped, ammunitioned, even fed by the United States. Each country was supposed to repay the US government $14.70 per man per day in the field – though settlement was deferred until the armistice. Individual nations also paid for some of their supplies. Once when a Filipino artillery battery was called upon to lay down a heavy barrage in support of the Turkish brigade, it is claimed that the following morning, the Filipino commander
protested to his American divisional commander about the cost to his poor country of all that ammunition. Yet, for all the great and sincere efforts that were made by senior Americans to cloak their efforts in Korea in the mantle of the United Nations, from beginning to end the conflict could never be other than Washington’s war, to which other states provided token contributions chiefly for the diplomatic appeasement of the United States.

Among the most prominent contributors, the Turks sent a much-respected infantry brigade, whose men were evidently uninterested in higher tactics or sophisticated military skills, but possessed much rugged courage and willingness to endure. The Philippines, Thailand, Holland, Ethiopia, Colombia, Belgium and Greece each contributed infantry battalions with some supporting elements. South Africa provided a fighter squadron. The more cautious Indians, Scandinavians and Italians provided medical units. The French, whose military resources were strained to the utmost in Indochina and North Africa, provided a token infantry battalion which was exceptionally well regarded. The French unit, like those of all the other small nations, was incorporated into an American formation. But by far the most important non-American contribution was that of Canada and other nations of the British Commonwealth. The major Commonwealth countries all provided significant air and naval forces. Canada dispatched three destroyers and an air transport squadron soon after the outbreak of war, and maintained a significant naval presence until the end. In addition, on the ground the British provided two infantry brigades, an armoured regiment, and supporting artillery and engineers. The Canadians sent a reinforced infantry brigade. In June 1950, their armed forces totalled only 20,369 men of all ranks, and thus assembling a contingent posed great problems. Their initial unit, the 2nd Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, proved to include much unsatisfactory material and many men who had to be sent home. But after that first shake-out, the ‘Princess Pats’ were welded into a fine fighting unit. The Australians also sent two exceptionally good infantry battalions, the New Zealanders an artillery regiment. In
July 1951, all these elements were combined to form the Commonwealth Division, under the command of Major-General James Cassels. In the two years that followed the formation achieved an outstanding reputation in Korea. ‘There was enormous enthusiasm for the ideal,’ said the division’s first artillery commander, Brigadier William Pike. ‘There was tremendous competition between the units, because nobody wanted to be thought less good than the others.’ The genuine excitement within the division, about proving that the experiment of an integrated Commonwealth fighting force could work, gave its senior officers, if not its men, reasons for being in Korea that seemed to many more worthwhile than defending the regime of Syngman Rhee. ‘You must remember that at that period, we still assumed that the Empire would go on,’ said Pike.
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And among all the UN formations fighting in Korea, there were the Koreans themselves. The decision to provide a contingent of ‘Katousas’, Korean Attached Troops, to every Allied sub-unit was partly a desperate expedient to bring some UN formations up to strength, and partly a reflection of the UN Command’s lack of confidence in the ROK troops’ ability to fight in formations. Thus, almost every American and Commonwealth platoon possessed its handful of Koreans. Some were adopted as much-beloved mascots, some were respected as memorable comrades. Others were treated with callous contempt. As a system of reinforcement, it left much to be desired, because few Koreans became sufficiently integrated in the units to which they were attached to be fully accepted and trusted. Meanwhile, the ROK army’s formations continued to cause chronic concern to the commanders of Eighth Army. Faced by a communist offensive, they collapsed with monotonous regularity. Knowing themselves to be untrusted by their foreign sponsors, the Koreans repeatedly showed themselves militarily untrustworthy. Until the end of the war, the worst excesses of corruption were commonplace in the ROK army. Officers neglected their men, sold their rations on the black market, paid phantom soldiers to line
their own pockets, neglected even to give the men in their ranks the pittance of pay to which they were entitled. The only consolation for being an ROK soldier was that, for some men, life was marginally more endurable than for their civilian counterparts. The South Koreans, from beginning to end of the war, suffered an eternity of hardship and injustice, modified only by the efforts of foreign refugee organisations who did their best to feed and clothe the worst sufferers. ‘The whole country seemed to have become a quagmire,’ said Lieutenant Chris Snider of the Canadian Brigade. ‘Everything had been beaten down to the lowest level. There seemed no society but peasant society. The place was a huge armed camp, strewn with homeless children and devastation.’
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To every foreigner, the poverty was almost unbelievable. President Rhee’s official salary was US $37.50 a month; that of a ROK army colonel, $10.75. The Bank of Korea claimed that the average salary of a Korean was $5, yet the average spending in a family of 4.6 adults was $32. The Koreans suggested, denying the vast influence of the black market, that the difference was made up by families selling odd valuables, putting children in street stalls, and ‘calling on Confucius for aid’. The equation was distorted by foreign largesse: every Korean employee of EUSAK was paid $17.50, and the average houseboy received $30 to $60. It was a web of hardship interwoven with corruption and foreign free spending which was to wreak equal havoc with the moral fabric of Vietnamese society a decade later.

Suk Bun Yoon, the fourteen-year-old schoolboy who had twice escaped from Seoul under communist occupation, was living with the remains of his family as suppliants upon the charity of a village south of the capital in the spring of 1951. A government mobilisation decree was suddenly thrust upon the village: twenty able-bodied men were required for military service. Suk’s family was offered a simple proposal by the villagers: if the boy would go to the army in place of one of their own, they would continue to feed his parents.

An American army truck bore him and the other bewildered young men first to Seoul, and then on up the dusty road towards the front. They spent a night in an old station warehouse, where they were given chocolate and a can of corned beef. It was the first meat the boy had tasted for six months, and was impossibly rich. He was sick at once. Next morning, after five hours on the road, he and a cluster of others were deposited at the camp of the Royal Ulster Rifles. He was not to be a soldier, but a porter under military discipline. He found himself joining a unit of some forty porters attached to the battalion. His first job was to carry a coil of barbed wire up to the forward positions. It was hopeless. He was too young, and too weak. The corporal in charge took pity on him. He was assigned to become a sweeper and odd-job boy at the rear echelon. Yet life remained desperately hard. Each night, the porters were confined to their hut, yet they were sometimes awakened amid the sound of the gunfire to carry ammunition or equipment forward. One day, they found themselves hastily ordered back to a new position. Suk scarcely understood what was happening, beyond the confusion of retreat. Gradually, he and the others understood that there had been a battle, and heavy casualties. Around half the porters had disappeared, captured or killed.

After the battle, the porters’ conditions seemed to improve. Suk became more accustomed to the life, and determined to educate himself. As he learned a little English, he questioned the soldiers incessantly: What was the longest river in the world? Which was the highest mountain? How was England governed? Since in later life he became a professor of economics, this experiment cannot be considered a complete failure. The soldiers called him ‘Spaniard’, because he had a reputation for hot temper. Yet when the Ulsters were relieved and he found himself attached to the Royal Norfolks, conditions deteriorated again. He was caught scavenging for food, roughly handled, and sent for a spell in a barbed-wire cage. He was then sacked from his job as a porter at battalion headquarters, and sent to the pioneer platoon, where he spent several more months.