The Korean War (61 page)

Why did such a man as Andrew Condron, the twenty-three-year-old barrack-room socialist from West Lothian, become, in the eyes of his countrymen, a traitor by refusing repatriation at the end of the war, along with twenty-one Americans? The simple answer, perhaps, is that he was ripe for it. Condron always refused to see himself as a traitor. He declared his lifelong pride in his country, in his service in the Royal Marines. But he had always been a member of ‘the awkward squad’ – ‘Red’ Condron, the man forever asking questions, who instinctively resisted authority in any form. In Camp 5, he became fascinated by Marxism:

I had seen the suffering and hardship among people in the Mediterranean, and I related to it. Why were there the very rich and very poor? Surely life could be better organised than that. There was a large element of romanticism about China, a sense of adventure. At that time, I thought I’d go to China for a year or so, then come home. Had things not turned out the way they did, I might have become a missionary. I wanted to go and live in Russia afterwards. What I wanted to know was – Did it work? I wasn’t a convinced communist, but a convinced Marxist. I have remained one all my life. I had lost my Catholic faith even before I went into the Marines. Perhaps I needed something to latch on to.
²²

Thirty-five years later, it seems much easier to accept the naive simplicity of Condron’s reasoning than it was for his contemporaries. They perceived an enormity about his act, a sense of national disgrace which was shared by Americans towards their own prisoners who chose to remain in China. Condron ‘the Bolshie’, the instinctively bloody-minded, made a gesture which seems, with hindsight, to owe far less to the wiles of his communist captors than to his own wilfulness. It is striking that most of his British fellow-prisoners, even ‘the reactionaries’ who fiercely declined to co-operate with their captors, bear Condron little or no resentment today. At no time during their imprisonment was he suspected of the acts of personal betrayal of his comrades of which many other
prisoners were guilty, who returned to their countries free of the stain of treason. It was men’s personal betrayals that their peers found impossible to forgive. And these owed nothing to ideology, but everything to a pathetic collapse of will and self-discipline in the face of intolerable suffering and privation.

Guy Ward was cynically amused, on the eve of his release, to discover that the Chinese provided the same sort of demonstration of their generosity that he had received from the Germans. Just as in 1945 they had been given back lighters, pens, watches, so now the prisoners were given souvenir toiletries and fountain pens. Some of their captors sought to make amends for all that had happened in the previous two years: ‘We are sorry, very sorry this has happened. We are friends. It is the American imperialists.’ But even thirty-five years later, Ward would think of the Chinese and say simply: ‘I loathe them.’

What was remarkable was not how many men were scarred for life by the experience of communist captivity, but how many shrugged it off with little long-term effect. General William Dean, the commander of the US 24th Division captured at Taejon in July 1950, was held for three years in solitary confinement near Pyongyang, subjected to intense Marxist-Leninist indoctrination. Yet Dean, on his release, merely remarked lightly: ‘I’m an authority now on the history of the Communist Party and much of its doctrine.’

‘I took the simple professional soldier’s view,’ said Captain James Majury. ‘I certainly came out saying: “I shall never leave food on my plate again.” But I felt that if one had been stupid enough to be taken prisoner, one must accept the consequences. It was an experience that I would not want to repeat, but it probably did not do me much permanent harm.’ The most lasting mark of imprisonment upon Lieutenant Bill Cooper was the destruction of trust in his fellow-men: ‘It made me look at people and say: “You are guilty until I have found you innocent.” It also made me not care about things. If somebody said to me, “You mustn’t do that,” I would say: “Why? I’ll make my own decision.” ’ Private Bill Shirk
of the 15th Field Artillery found the whole experience ‘a bad, bad, dream. All the time, I kept asking, “Why don’t they come and get us out?” We were fighting these primitive people, for Chrissakes. I made up my mind: if I ever get out of this place, I won’t ever put myself out for anybody. What the hell did we want with this country, anyway? I sure felt let down.’

The exact number of British prisoners who died in captivity is uncertain, but it was probably around fifty, against a total of 1,036 who were repatriated by the communists in 1953. 2,730 of the 7,190 American prisoners who fell into communist hands did not return. At least some hundreds of these were murdered in cold blood by the North Koreans. Many more died on the terrible journey to the camps, or in the first winter of the war. American students judge the casualties to represent the highest prisoner death rate in any conflict in the nation’s history, including the Revolutionary war. Yet why was it that none of the 229 Turkish prisoners died, and only 13 per cent of US Marines, against 38 per cent of army prisoners? Part of the answer – a significant part – was that most of the non-American prisoners were captured after the winter of 1950, when the communists were making greater efforts to keep prisoners alive. But also, ‘the army felt that its losses were due not so much to the Communists’ disregard of the Geneva Convention – although this was unquestionably contributory,’ wrote an American writer who investigated the issue in detail, ‘as to the breakdown of discipline among the prisoners themselves. Many men after capture appeared to have lost all sense of allegiance, not only to their country but to their fellow-prisoners.’
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One in seven of all US prisoners was considered by subsequent army investigations to have been guilty of ‘serious collaboration’. The US Army’s post-war reports upon the conduct of its own men in captivity inflicted a major trauma. It was felt necessary, in its aftermath, to draw up a Code of Conduct for US servicemen, reminding them of their obligations to their comrades, and to their country, if they fell into the hands of the enemy. It must be a measure of the success achieved by training in
prisoner behaviour after Korea that US prisoners in Hanoi conducted themselves, as a group, incomparably better than those in the camps along the Yalu.

The revelation of what the communists had done to the UN prisoners in their hands had a profound influence upon the West’s perception of the Korean War, and of the Chinese. For much of the conflict, the men on the line felt little hatred for their Chinese opponents, although the North Koreans enjoyed an unchallenged reputation for barbarism. But the shock of discovery of the plight of the prisoners placed Chinese conduct in a different, infinitely more sinister light. Mao Tse Tung’s China acquired a far more frightening and disturbing aspect. From this, arguably, its image in the West never recovered. Long after the Korean War receded into memory, the fear of ‘the Manchurian candidate’ remained.

16 » ATTRITION:
THE WAR ON THE HILLS

Through the last two years of the war, for all the periodic surges of tactical activity, the ferocious struggles which cost thousands of men on both sides their lives in pursuit of hill numbers or map references, the strategic situation in Korea remained unchanged. From time to time, the planners in Washington and Tokyo conceived grand initiatives for airborne drops or amphibious landings behind the enemy flank, designed dramatically to concentrate in Peking minds upon the negotiating table. Among many parallels between Korea and the later experience of Vietnam, as Dr Rosemary Foot has written, was ‘the maintenance of the assumption expressed in the 1950s that using increased force can generate concessions at the negotiating table’. The confidence of many American commanders in their ability to smash the Chinese line and reach the Yalu once more, if the leashes were slipped and the UN armies plunged all-out for victory, remained a source of deep frustration. But the political realities ensured that their hopes were stillborn. The American public was weary of Korea. It was narrowly possible to sustain America’s national will for the defence of a line across the peninsula until a compromise was reached, for avoiding the concession of defeat to the communists. But the political consequences of any action involving many thousands of casualties – as an all-out offensive must – were intolerable. There was no possibility that America’s allies would countenance any dramatic expedient. It was proving difficult enough, diplomatically, to sustain the United Nations’ support for a tough bargaining stance at Panmunjom. The possibility of a decisive outcome had vanished in the spring of 1951, when the recall of MacArthur decisively
demonstrated Washington’s rejection of all-out war with China as the price of victory in Korea. The Western powers were unhappily reconciled to the concept of Korea as a limited war, in which their highest aspiration was to demonstrate that their own will to defend the
status quo ante
would remain unbroken.

For many Americans at home, coming to terms with the limits of their own nation’s power was a bitter process. Yet it was much more so for the hundreds of thousands of men in the bunkers and foxholes from sea to sea across the Korean peninsula. Each day, they faced the prospect of death or disablement with pathetically slender prospects of compensating glory, or even respect at home. A British officer spoke of the unhappiness among some of his subordinates in 29 Brigade, when they received letters from their wives at home describing the public indifference towards and ignorance about Korea. In the Second World War, men was sustained by the knowledge that their entire nation, on the home front, was committed to the struggle, and understood what those on the battlefield were seeking to do. The wives of the men in Korea found, instead, that some neighbours inquired clumsily where their husbands were, and showed surprise to be reminded that a war was still being waged in Asia. For the professionals, of course, this was less disturbing. If a British regular soldier was not in Korea, he would be in Malaya, or on the Rhine, or in the deserts of the Middle East. A Frenchman might be in central Africa or Indochina. An American might merely be stagnating at Fort Bragg. Korea offered career soldiers opportunities for combat experience, and for distinction. But for those who were conscripted, the equation was different. British National Servicemen in Korea were irked by the meagre pay they received, alongside that of Regulars sharing the same risks. Death along the 38th Parallel signified the termination of an adult life before it had usefully begun. The Western nations in Korea had borrowed the lives of some thousands of their young men for a cause few of them appreciated. Yet for more than a few, the loan was transformed into permanent confiscation.

In many ways, it was remarkable that the morale of the UN forces held up as well as it did, until the summer of 1953. Private James Stuhler of the US 3rd Division, who later served in Vietnam, remarked that his generation of soldiers had been reared in the ‘Yours Not To Reason Why’ tradition: ‘The army in Korea was much less well informed than the army in Vietnam. In Korea, guys on line read comic books. In Vietnam, you’d see men reading the
Wall Street Journal
. That later generation was better educated, much more questioning. We just got on and did it without thinking much about why we were being asked to do it.’
¹
Some officer veterans of both wars suggested another important contrast with Vietnam: ‘In Korea, there was nothing to do but fight.’ For some miles behind the front, a zone had been systematically cleared of all civilians, so that the defenders could be certain that any unidentified figure was hostile. With dogged cunning, a litter of prostitutes periodically defied the expulsion orders to ply their trade in primitive ‘rabbit hutches’ a few hundred yards behind the line. A sprinkling of refugees and infiltrators continued to test the vigilance of the outposts, despite the brutal risk that if they fell into South Korean hands and their
bona fides
was suspect, they would be shot out of hand. But for the most part, the forward area remained resolutely military territory, under military discipline. There were no officers’ clubs or bars, no drugs or movies or diversions. There were only the mountain ridges, surmounted by the defences which both sides now dug with extraordinary care and caution.

Along most of the line, the United Nations and the Chinese faced each other a mile or so apart, from foxholes and observation posts sited on the forward slopes. But these were no longer the casual scrapes of troops in constant motion across a battlefield: they were fortresses, honeycombs of bunkers and tunnels bored into earth and rock by engineers with bulldozers and pneumatic drills, roofed with steel supports and timber, surmounted by many feet of earth or sandbags. They resembled the diggings of an army of monstrous moles, the setts of a great legion of badgers. Some
were surmounted by carefully emplaced tanks, providing not only direct fire support, but night illumination from big searchlights mounted upon their hulls. By day, the only sign of human occupation of the ridge line was an occasional fluttering national flag, or a defiant gesture by a man recklessly exposing himself on the skyline. Most men were asleep below ground on bunks woven from planks and telephone wire, or standing watch at a BC scope whose lenses filled the narrow firing slit in front of a bunker. ‘You could always tell how dangerous a position was by the size of its front apertures,’ said Sergeant Tom Pentony of the 5th Marines. ‘A big aperture meant no one was doing much shooting. A small aperture meant you were in trouble.’
²
When the World War I veteran Field-Marshal Lord Alexander visited Korea, he observed at once that the manner of warfare reminded him of Flanders.