The Korean War (67 page)

But the problem of the attitude of the guards to the prisoners persisted. ‘
All
US troops,’ reported Major Bancroft,

were apt to regard the PWs as cattle, and treated them as such. They were offensive in speech and manner towards the prisoners, and handled them, including cripples who had been badly wounded, extremely roughly. When witnessing this tendency, I asked both officers and men if they expected similar treatment to be meted out to their PWs in North Korea. Their reply was invariably: ‘Well, these people are savages’; and on one occasion: ‘Congress has never ratified the Geneva Convention anyway.’

It was quite clear that the leaders [of the prisoners] could whip up mass hysteria among the PWs. It is therefore essential to segregate the ardent communist leaders as soon as they begin to make trouble. Their cruelty is beyond belief. Normal torture was to hang offenders to the ridge poles of tents by their testicles, place water hoses in offenders’ mouths who were left to drown slowly,
etc.
As soon as it is known that atrocities are being committed, immediate action must be taken to release the victims. This was seldom done. The PWs organised the running of their camps extremely well. Morale was high under the most adverse conditions. Physical fitness through organised PT was compulsory . . . I formed the opinion that the North Korean was more honest, more militant, cleaner and better-educated than the South Korean.
⁶

Major Bancroft’s extremely disturbing report was forwarded to the Foreign Office in August 1952. An official attached a minute to the text: ‘The report confirms others accounts we have had of the “Hate Asia” attitude so freely displayed by Americans in the Far East. The harm which such behaviour does to our joint cause needs no emphasising. It seems to us that if the United States’ Joint Chiefs of Staff were to take practical measures of indoctrination, a good deal might be done towards improving the behaviour of the US Armed Forces.’
⁷
If these remarks – intended only, of course, for internal Whitehall consumption – sound somewhat complacent and patronising, the seriousness of the problem of US attitudes to the prisoners on Koje-do is confirmed by American reports to Washington. A fatal combination of incompetence, lassitude, and casual brutality by their captors had enabled the communists to gain a bloody triumph in their propaganda struggle.

From the summer of 1952, the Americans sought to regain control over their prisoners by dividing and relocating them among a number of offshore island camps. Yet the savage revolts continued. On 14 December, some 3,600 of the 9,000 prisoners on Pongan-do fought a pitched battle with guards in which they advanced, arms locked together, hurling a barrage of rocks and missiles. Eighty-four prisoners died, and a further 120 were wounded before peace was restored. Public controversy persisted about the treatment of communist PoWs. ‘The United Nations refuse to return captives who would almost certainly be shot when they got home,’ commented the London
Daily Mail
on 18 December. ‘But the effect of this humanitarian policy will be weakened by continual shooting of prisoners, even in self-defence.’ Yet how, in the face of the fanatical and murderous behaviour of the commissars
behind the wire, was control of the prisoners to be maintained? An International Red Cross delegate, Colonel Fred Bieri, reported from Koje-do:

Many prisoners’ spokesmen have informed the delegate of their grave concern on the question of repatriation. According to their statements, it appears that there are North and South Koreans (both PoW and Civilian Internees) who wish to return to North Korea, and North and South Koreans who desire to remain in South Korea. Many Chinese PoWs desire to be sent to Formosa. Many men at present living in close contact with those of opposite political ideology are scared to express their real opinions; others have been forced by their comrades to make statements which are contrary to their wishes. Our delegate states that the effects of political pressure (from both sides) as applied to PoWs by PoWs themselves can be clearly observed. Most of the incidents which have occurred so far were actuated by purely political motives.
⁸

Bieri and General Boatner discussed the seemingly intractable problem of communist terrorisation within the compounds: ‘The Commandant regretted these incidents, but explained how difficult it is to keep each tent under observation in complete darkness. These beatings, which, unfortunately, often cause deaths, happen quickly and are carried out by well-organised groups. Even should culprits be recognised by tent inmates, fear prevents eyewitnesses from giving evidence.’
⁹

In the last months of the war, control was tenuously maintained among the communist prisoners of the UN. But the Western powers had been dealt another bitter reminder that the conflict in Korea was being fought by new rules, far outside the historic experience of the democracies.

2. ‘I shall go to Korea’

By the summer of 1952, the weariness of the United Nations, and above all the United States, with the war in Korea, was becoming intolerable. So too was the embarrassment of defending the excesses of President Syngman Rhee. In Tokyo, General Mark Clark, veteran of the World War II Italian campaign, had replaced Ridgway when the paratrooper departed for Europe to succeed General Dwight Eisenhower in command of the NATO armies. As the corrupt farce of a South Korean election loomed, Clark discussed with Van Fleet at Eighth Army by cable the possible implications of Rhee’s defeat, in the unlikely event that the people of South Korea were allowed to achieve such a verdict:

‘In the remote possibility that President Rhee accepts defeat gracefully,’ said Clark sardonically, ‘it is recommended that he should be urged to serve his country by making a worldwide lecture tour at UN expense to explain his country’s problems and needs.’

But if Rhee forcibly resisted ejection, the UN would face serious problems: ‘We do not have the troops to withstand a major communist offensive, to retain uncontested control of the prisoners of war on Koje-do, and to handle major civil disturbances in our rear areas at the same time. Therefore, we must swallow our pride to a certain extent until Rhee, through his illegal and diabolical action, has catapulted us into a situation where positive action must be taken.’

In other words, the US and the UN must somehow stomach almost any political excesses in Seoul. The military situation was causing equal dismay. ‘. . . it appears that, within current capabilities (in the true sense) and existing policies, there are no military courses of action that will ensure a satisfactory conclusion to the
Korean struggle,’ the Assistant Chief of Staff (Plans) minuted on 15 September 1952.

The problem of Korea is essentially part of a larger problem in Asia having its genesis in the aggressive posture and actions of communist China. The JCS recorded that the United States’ objectives, policies, and courses of action in Asia should be reviewed, in order to determine the extent to which the United States military resources should be committed to deter or repel Chinese communist aggression.
¹⁰

Here was a heartcry from the Pentagon to the Administration: What are we doing in Korea? How quickly can we get out? This private debate in the offices and corridors of Washington matched the great public one, fought out all that year, on the election platforms of the country.

In the early months of 1952, there was intense public debate on President Truman’s prospects of gaining a third term. Towards the end of 1950, his ‘favourable’ ratings in the Gallup poll were running at 46 per cent, the highest he ever achieved. For the remainder of his term, popular approval of his performance never rose above 32 per cent, and sometimes fell as low as 23 per cent. On 29 March 1952, Truman chose the annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner at Washington National Guard Armoury to announce that he would not run for re-election. He always claimed thereafter that he made his decision because he believed two terms enough for any President, and that he could have retained the White House had he chosen to fight. This was unlikely, above all when it became apparent that his Republican opponent would be America’s most celebrated living soldier, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Early in April, Eisenhower asked to be relieved of his military duties as NATO’s first commander, because of his ‘surprising development as a political figure’. For most of that year, Eisenhower sought to create the impression that he had somehow been drafted by popular acclaim, rather than made a conscious and ambitious decision to run. Likewise, he did his utmost to avoid explicit statements of
political policy or intention. He was just Ike, and he believed that he could be elected for what he was, not for what he promised. He was almost right. Adlai Stevenson, the Illinois governor whom Truman had selected to succeed himself, could not unite even his own Democratic Party behind him, far less the nation. Eisenhower, with his great grin and good-natured professions of pious intention, his prudent equivocation about McCarthyism and invulnerable status as a national hero, was unstoppable. Pathetically, Douglas MacArthur still cherished hopes of the GOP nomination. At the convention, he received just ten votes. Ike won on the first ballot, by 595 votes to Taft’s 500.

It would be wrong to suggest that the pursuit of an escape route from the war dominated the 1952 US Presidential election campaign. Indeed, by that year one of the foremost grievances of the men freezing or sweltering on the line was that so many of their own countrymen appeared to have forgotten that they were there. But weariness with Korea played its part not only in the political decline of Harry Truman, but in the election of Dwight Eisenhower. Korea was one of the ‘four Cs’, alongside Corruption, Crime, and Communism. The last glories of the New Deal had vanished in a welter of seedy Administration corruption scandals. Few Americans, few Westerners, any longer drew sustenance from a sense of high purpose in Korea. The cause was now tarnished by so many of the stains and blemishes that would assert themselves again in Indochina a generation later: the inglorious nature of a struggle that denied the promise of military success; the embarrassment of fighting for a regime whose corruption and incompetence were bywords; the difficulty of welding the South Korean army into a fighting force capable of meeting the Chinese on anything like equal terms; the reluctance of America’s allies to shoulder a proportionate share of the burden. Before Vietnam was ever heard of, Americans discovered in Korea an unprecedented frustration of national will.

Despite the honourable character of both candidates, America’s 1952 Presidential campaign was one of the most distasteful of
modern times, dominated by the shadow of McCarthyism and the anti-communist crusade. MacArthur’s objections to Eisenhower were partly founded upon the belief that Ike was insufficiently zealous in his hostility to communism, at home and abroad. Yet paradoxically, few American conservatives cried out for a more vigorous military policy in Korea, the one battlefield on which communism was being confronted at gunpoint. McCarthy and his acolytes declared that American blood was being wasted in a struggle that the Administration was conducting without conviction. Their isolationism militated against any display of enthusiasm for an increased American commitment to a campaign in Asia. Like most of their fellow-countrymen, they wanted to see America out of Korea. They sought only an escape without intolerable loss of face.

John Foster Dulles, the architect of Eisenhower’s foreign policy for much of his election campaign and presidency, believed that Truman’s decision to intervene in Korea had been ‘courageous, righteous, and in the national interest’. But Dulles also considered that the broader Truman–Acheson strategy of containment of the Soviet Union by limited action and reaction had enabled the Russians to choose where, when, and how to confront the United States. Dulles wished to see America’s military and foreign policy organised in a fashion that would enable the country to deploy its full might. He was the creator of the concept of ‘massive retaliation’ which somewhat troubled Eisenhower. Dulles proposed to keep the Soviet Union in a condition of permanent uncertainty and apprehension about where and when the United States would meet communist aggression with unbridled atomic reprisals. As a corollary of this policy, it was no longer in America’s interest to become bogged down in limited local wars on distant battlefields against Soviet surrogates. Dulles favoured disengagement from Korea.

Eisenhower’s early campaign statements on Korea were marked not merely by vagueness, but foolishness. In one speech in August, he claimed that the Administration had committed itself
to the serious error of withdrawing US troops from Korea in 1949, ‘despite menacing signs from the North’.
¹¹
In reality, of course, Eisenhower himself had been a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who advised the Administration in September 1947 that the United States had ‘little strategic interest’ in maintaining a military presence in Korea. Truman was disgusted by Eisenhower’s posture. He and the Democrats continued to demand insistently that Eisenhower should declare precisely what, if elected, he proposed to do about the war.

Truman’s question was answered by Emmet John Hughes, a
Life
magazine editor who had become a speech-writer for Eisenhower, and Herbert Brownell, his campaign manager. In a long discussion over dinner in Brownell’s New York apartment, the two men groped for a decisive declaration that their candidate could make, which would yet commit him to nothing. It was Hughes who seized upon the idea that Eisenhower should promise to go to Korea and make a personal assessment of the war. He and Brownell then distilled a single, simple, short phrase for Ike: ‘I shall go to Korea.’ The candidate himself proved uneasy about the idea, and the speech that was built for him around it. But on 24 October in Detroit, despite the doubts of some of his advisers, he took the plunge. In a speech at the Masonic Temple that was broadcast on nationwide television, he concluded with the declaration that his first priority upon taking office as President would be to bring an end to the war in Korea: ‘That job requires a personal trip to Korea. I shall make that trip. Only in that way could I learn best how to serve the American people in the cause of peace. I shall go to Korea.’