The Korean War (69 page)

Yet even as the Western world waited impatient and expectant for a settlement at Panmunjom, for an end to the long stalemate of which the Allies had grown so weary, inside South Korea
entirely different emotions reached boiling point. For President Syngman Rhee and his followers, the prospective armistice that offered peace to Seoul’s foreign allies signalled the collapse of all their hopes. Always an obsessively stubborn man, Rhee was now also a bitter one. He saw plainly that Eisenhower proposed to accept a ceasefire based upon the permanent division of Korea, and the continuance of a serious communist threat to the Seoul government. The South Korean declared again and again that he would never countenance a settlement that did not remove the Chinese from North Korea, and effectively demilitarise the North. His warnings of imminent American betrayal made an impact upon even those of his countrymen who detested him. If the anti-American rallies in major cities were inspired by Rhee’s agents, they were attended by many Koreans full of genuine fears for their society’s future if the Americans withdrew, leaving South Korea at the mercy of the communists beyond the ceasefire line. Even opposition politicians in the National Assembly joined the desperate clamour. Rhee now directly threatened Eisenhower: if a deal was made at Panmunjom which permitted the Chinese to remain in North Korea, the ROK army would continue the fight unaided, if need be, until the communists were pushed north of the Yalu. However empty this threat in simple military terms, it caused the utmost alarm in diplomatic and political ones. Rhee’s behaviour, it seemed, might now shatter the entire fabric of the peace talks.

Mark Clark did his utmost to assuage the Korean President’s fears. The expansion of the ROK army would proceed whatever the outcome at Panmunjom, the American assured him. He believed that he had been successful in persuading Rhee of the futility of seeking to sabotage the peace negotiations. Clark cabled the JCS: ‘He is bargaining now to get a security pact, to obtain more economic aid, and to make his people feel he is having a voice in the armistice negotiations.’ The infinitely obstinate Korean was not finished yet.

Nor were the Chinese. On 26 April, their delegation at the peace talks entered a new proposal about the prisoners: three
months after a ceasefire, those who refused repatriation should be moved for another six months to a neutral state, where representatives of their own government would have access to them. Those who still refused repatriation at the end of this process would remain in confinement while further negotiations were held to decide their fate. American counter-proposals were rejected. For four days, the communists harangued the UN delegation across the conference table, in a return to the exchanges of stultifying rhetoric that characterised the earlier stages of negotiations. Finally, the talks were adjourned. Clark consulted with Washington.

To the American’s acute embarrassment, his government now determined to make the very concession that it had refused for so long, that was certain to provoke a new upheaval in relations with President Rhee: the UN delegation was to agree that Koreans, as well as Chinese, who refused repatriation should be handed over to the Indian neutral supervisory commission. Rhee’s rage, when this news was broken to him, brought relations between Washington and Seoul to their lowest ebb since the war began. The Korean threatened to withdraw his army from the UN Command. The Americans, in their turn, undertook hasty secret preparations to implement Plan EVER-READY, a politico-military operation to seize control of South Korea from Rhee’s regime. If it proved necessary to launch EVER-READY, the Korean President ‘would be held in protective custody, incommunicado’, unless he agreed to accept the terms reached at Panmunjom. Either his prime minister, Chang Taek Sang, would be installed as head of government, or failing his consent, a military regime would be established. On 29 May, Dulles and Wilson – the Defense Secretary – gave Clark authority to take whatever steps he considered necessary in Korea in the event of a ‘grave emergency’. They did not explicitly approve the proposal for Rhee’s detention. But they gave their Commander-in-Chief almost unlimited discretion to act as he saw fit in an internal crisis in Korea.

By 25 May, it was apparent that the communists were ready to accept the modified American proposals for the exchange of
prisoners. Mark Clark drove to Rhee’s home to present the bitterly unwelcome news. Rhee received him alone, forcefully denounced the armistice proposals, and the United States’ foolish course of appeasement of the communists. Clark departed, still uncertain what the Korean intended to do. The negotiations at Panmunjom continued. On 8 June, agreement was at last reached on the terms for repatriation of prisoners. Those who wished to go home could be exchanged immediately. Those who did not would be left in the hands of the Repatriation Commission for ninety days, during which their governments would have free access to them. Their future would then be discussed for a further thirty days by a ‘political conference’. After that period, those who remained would be considered civilians.

The details of this arrangement were still being concluded on the night of 18 June 1953, when to the astonishment and bewilderment of the handful of Americans at the huge Pusan PoW compound, they saw that the main gates were open, and a vast herd of North Koreans were streaming out into the countryside, watched with supine indifference by their South Korean guards. The same process was taking place at three other compounds around the country. Some 25,000 North Koreans who had expressed unwillingness to return to their homeland after the armistice disappeared into the darkness. President Rhee had acted. Seoul radio warned escapees to beware of American soldiers seeking to apprehend them. Seoul’s soldiers and police gave the men clothing, and directed them towards shelter. Even as US troops were rushed to the compounds to take over guard duties, liberation operations continued. By 22 June, only 9,000 North Koreans remained in captivity, out of a total of 35,400. Only 1,000 of those who had gone were rounded up. The mass liberation was one of the most efficiently organised exercises in the history of the ramshackle Seoul regime.

In Washington, it caused genuine consternation. What now, if the communists regarded Rhee’s action as sufficient cause to break off the negotiations? The Administration hastened publicly to
deplore the Korean’s action, and dissociate the United States from it. For days, Washington waited anxiously for a sign from Peking. When at last it came, deep sighs of relief were audible at the State Department. Broadcasts from the New China News Agency deplored the episode, but displayed a willingness to listen to American explanations. The delegation at Panmunjom provided them. They were accepted. The peace talks entered their final phase.

Yet now, the critical conversations were taking place not at Panmunjom, but in Syngman Rhee’s office. It was a matter of paramount importance to secure the Korean President’s public consent. To achieve this, the Americans were prepared to threaten to abandon absolutely the Seoul regime if it was not forthcoming. Yet it was essential that no word of the strength of American attitudes should leak out to the communists, for it would immeasurably reinforce their hand, and their determination. Through the last days of June and the early days of July, Rhee spent hours closeted in private talks with Mark Clark and President Eisenhower’s special envoy, Walter Robertson. Into Robertson’s ear, Rhee poured his interminable grievances against the United States. At each session, the elderly President appeared to change the ground of his demands.

Rhee’s obduracy now remained the sole obstacle to the signing of an armistice. Even as he and his American guests talked in Seoul, on the battlefield United Nations troops were repelling the heaviest Chinese offensive for two years. After a long period of stagnation at the front, the communists plainly determined to drive home to the South Koreans their military vulnerability. Some 100,000 communist troops struck across the front of five ROK divisions. The South Koreans were thrown back in disarray up to five miles before a vast UN artillery concentration was laid in the path of the enemy offensive. 2.7 million rounds were fired on the UN front in June, a million more than in any month of the war thus far. While the communists sought to demonstrate their will to prevail on the battlefield, if they were denied an acceptable peace at the conference table, the UN proved its ability to deploy
massed firepower to thwart them. Heavy fighting continued into July. The UN suffered 17,000 casualties, including 3,333 killed, in the twenty days between agreement in principle being reached between the delegations at Panmunjom, and Syngman Rhee acknowledging his readiness to accept it.

For accept Rhee finally did, on 9 July. He would not sign the armistice, he declared. But he would no longer obstruct it. On 12 July, the United States and the Republic of Korea announced their agreement on truce terms. Privately, the UN Command allowed the communists to know that they would give no support to independent offensive action by the ROK army.

Glimpses of sun broke through the heavy clouds overhanging Panmunjom on the early morning of 27 July. During the night, carpenters had worked in the rain to complete the building where the armistice was to be signed. Before the ceremony could take place, however, Mark Clark insisted upon the removal of two communist ‘peace dove’ propaganda symbols from the pagoda, and the creation of a new entrance, to avoid the necessity for his delegation to pass through the enemy area of the building. If such details seemed petty, their importance in negotiation with the communists had been grasped over two painful years of experience. A guard of honour, composed of representatives of each army that had fought for the UN cause, flanked the southern approach. Only the South Koreans were missing. Rhee would allow his soldiers no part in a process he detested.

At 10 a.m. precisely, the two delegations entered the building from opposite sides. It was two years and seventeen days since talks began. Some pedant or public relations man calculated that 18,000,000 words had been exchanged at 575 separate meetings. Now, Lieutenant-General William K. Harrison led in the UN contingent with studied casualness. His party strolled forward, and sat back easily in their chairs, while the communists, wooden-faced, took their places with an air of rigid formality. Harrison sat down at a table marked by a small UN flag, and began to sign the first of the nine blue-backed copies of the armistice agreement. General
Nam Il sat at the North Korean-flagged table. Without a word or a sign, the two men went through the formalities, while in the distance the crump of the guns went on. By 10.12 a.m., it was all over. Still without a word, the two men got up and departed through their allotted exits. It was done.

A few hours later, Mark Clark signed the documents at UN Advanced Headquarters at Mansan-ni. The former wartime commander of Fifth Army found the experience repugnant. ‘I cannot find it in me to exult in this hour,’ he said, in a short radio broadcast afterwards. ‘Rather it is a time for prayer, that we may succeed in our difficult endeavour to turn this armistice to the advantage of mankind.’ Later, in his memoirs, he declared that the moment ‘capped my career, but it was a cap without a feather’. He bitterly regretted becoming ‘the first US commander in history to sign an armistice without victory’. Clark was among those who always believed that the UN should have bombed beyond the Yalu, who shared many of Joseph McCarthy’s fears of secret enemies at the heart of America’s government. To the lanky, single-minded general, this inconclusive conclusion of the long and bloody experience of Korea was infinitely distasteful. To the end of their days, he and other senior American military men would continue to cherish the conviction that there was another, a better way to peace – through military victory. At the Korean Embassy in Washington, Han Pyo Wook sat in the office he had occupied through three long years of war, and where he had witnessed the first diplomatic acts of the drama: ‘There was no celebration,’ he said, ‘only bleak looks. We had fought the armistice to the end. How could we survive, with a million Chinese in North Korea? There was a very great sense of disappointment.’
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But many others, the men on the mountains from coast to coast of Korea, were merely content that there was peace.

In the last few hours before the ceasefire came into effect at 10 p.m., on some sectors of the front the artillery of both sides fired with
redoubled, passionate futility. ‘It was like the Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve rolled into one,’ said Lieutenant Bill Livsey of the 7th Infantry. He and many of the men around him could not believe that this vast, insensate din could be hushed according to a schedule. They were astonished, almost awed to discover that at 10 p.m., 2200 hours, a sudden deafening silence fell upon the line. ‘There was no elation. We were just so damn happy that it was over,’ said Livsey.
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In the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment sector, word came over the radio from battalion headquarters that other ranks might venture into no-man’s-land, but no officers were to do so. Within a few hours, little clusters of Chinese appeared in front of the wire, bearing bottles of rice spirit and little glass rings inscribed with the word ‘peace’.

At dawn on 28 July, Lieutenant Chris Snider of the Canadian Brigade watched fascinated with his men as the bare hillside opposite suddenly grew a forest of Chinese figures: ‘They all came out. My God, there were thousands of them, more than I ever thought possible, on every hill, standing gazing at us. Some of our people thought they must have been brought forward specially, to impress us.’
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On the US 7th Division’s sector of the front, the commanding general Arthur Trudeau ritually pulled the lanyard to fire his formation’s last round of the war, picked up the shellcase as a souvenir, and drove back to his Command Post for a few celebratory drinks with his staff, to musical accompaniment from the CP band in which he played the banjo. ‘I was happy it was over,’ he said. ‘It was apparent that all we were going to do was sit there and hold positions. There wasn’t going to be any victory. All we could do was go on losing more lives. In those last few months, I lost men faster than Westmoreland at any stage of the Vietnam War except Tet.’
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Private Alan Maybury of the Durham Light Infantry said: ‘We didn’t celebrate victory. We celebrated being able to go home.’
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