by Gwynne Dyer
The Murngin rarely fought pitched battles. The great majority of clashes followed the usual hunter-gatherer pattern of raids on sleeping camps or ambushes of severely outnumbered opponents. In most of these events, only a few individuals, or one, or most frequently none at all, were killed, but the clashes were so constant that over a lifetime Murngin men stood as great a chance of dying in war as the conscript soldiers of Napoleon’s France or Hitler’s Germany. The same pattern of constant low-level warfare was reported by other anthropologists studying the Eskimos of northwestern Alaska, the Mae Enga horticulturalists in highland New Guinea and the Yanomamo in the Amazon forest. Indeed, the latter two groups were both losing about the same proportion of their populations to war—25 percent of males and 5 percent of females—and their territories consisted of a relatively safe central area and a bigger buffer zone that they only entered in large groups.
Civilized people did not invent warfare. They inherited it from their hunter-gatherer ancestors, who in turn almost certainly inherited it from their pre-human ancestors. Some of the fossilized remains of Homo erectus found in Europe show signs of violence that might well have been inflicted by human-style weapons 750,000 years ago, particularly depression fractures in skulls that could be the result of blows from clubs. Neanderthal fossils found on several continents and ranging from forty to a hundred thousand years ago show stronger evidence of death inflicted by human weapons—spear wounds, a stone blade lodged between the ribs—and the evidence for chronic warfare among pre-civilized Homo sapiens is pretty conclusive. Why did they all behave like this?
In most cases, of course, they were simply born into a world where that was the way things worked, but there was a good reason why it worked that way. The world was never empty, and food was always limited. Human hunter-gatherers, like other predators, lived at very low population densities compared to their prey animals, but they invariably bred up to the local carrying capacity or even a bit beyond it. Then sooner or later, the normal food supply would be interrupted by changing weather patterns, alterations in animal migration routes, or other unpredictable factors. In a matter of weeks or months everybody in the band would be hungry all the time, and since human beings are gifted with foresight, they would know what lay ahead for the group if this continued. They would also know that other groups in the vicinity were facing the same problems. So it’s us or the neighbours, and we’re not both going to make it.
If this happens just once a century, then there will be ten times a millennium when some groups don’t make it, and more aggressive groups do. This sort of winnowing, extended over tens of thousands of years, would produce the kind of warfare between hunter-gatherer groups that the anthropologists discovered, including the phenomenon of apparently pointless aggression even in times of plenty. Whether this is just a deeply entrenched cultural phenomenon or to some extent genetic as well, it won’t be the sort of thing you can turn off in good times and switch back on when the going gets tough. Besides, every enemy you eliminate now is one you won’t have to deal with in a crisis.
This pattern of behaviour probably emerged not long after the first proto-humans became full-time group-living predators. After that, it was just passed down in the human lineage (and presumably the chimpanzee lineage as well) because it was the best strategy for long-term group survival. It probably still made sense right down to the time when human beings invented agriculture around eleven thousand years ago, although the cost in adult male lives was quite high.
If the goal is to tame the institution of warfare because it has become too destructive to tolerate any more—and that was what the founders of the League of Nations intended—then this is all very bad news. War is a much older and more deeply entrenched social institution than they realized. But there is also some good news at this point in history: as soon as people started farming, the population began to multiply and the first mass societies came into existence. At that point, the death rate from war dropped dramatically.
Wars did not stop, but even the early mass civilizations were so large that most people no longer lived an hour’s walk (or even a day’s) from the potentially hostile society next door, so most people were no longer so exposed to raiding. Moreover, when these societies did fight, they simply could not bring everybody to the battle. The relatively small proportion of the adult male population that ended up on the battlefield might have a very bad day, for battles undoubtedly got bloodier, but most people were not there and anyway battles only happened once or twice a year. Terrible things would still happen from time to time (for example, when cities were conquered and their entire populations enslaved or killed), but over the long run far fewer people died in war than in the hunter-gatherer societies. In fact, there have not been many generations of human beings since the rise of civilization in which the direct loss of life from war has exceeded 2 or 3 percent of the population—which is why nobody really saw war as a grave problem until recently.
The generation that fought the First World War was an exception to that rule, and the generation that fought the Second World War was another: the twentieth century saw the invention of weapons that briefly drove war back up almost to hunter-gatherer casualty rates. The last six decades have seen a return to “normal” casualty rates for civilized states, but the technologies now exist to make another great-power war (with nuclear weapons) a global holocaust, so the enterprise launched at Versailles by the survivors of the First World War and relaunched in San Francisco in 1945 is still highly relevant.
How much of our war-related behaviour is written in our genes? The fear and mistrust of strangers is probably innate, but our identities are fluid: we now live quite comfortably in mass societies that are descended from hundreds of different hunter-gatherer groups that once lived in a state of permanent warfare. It is much less likely that the actual institution of warfare has any genetic component. It is a cultural institution with very deep and ancient roots, but it is too complex and calculated to be purely instinctive. Nor are we trapped in the Malthusian dilemma of the hunter-gatherers: when the reasons to fight fade away, people don’t mind at all.
The little village societies of highland New Guinea, for example, went on fighting their vicious local wars even as the Second World War raged around them. But afterward, when the Australian police went around telling people that they couldn’t fight any more, the New Guineans thought that was wonderful. They were glad to have the excuse to stop.
CHAPTER 9
ALLIANCES AND PEACEKEEPING
I don’t think, to begin with, that the Russians had very much to do with the outbreak of the Korean War. It’s very hard to tell.… I don’t know this for certain, but I strongly suspect that the North Koreans had been pretty badly aggravated by attacks by the South Koreans before they ever invaded South Korea.
Admiral Jeffry Brock, Commander of Canadian Destroyers, Far East, 1950–51
The North Koreans wanted to prod South Korea with the point of a bayonet. Kim Il-sung said the first poke would touch off an internal explosion in South Korea and that the power of the people would prevail.…
Stalin persuaded Kim Il-sung that he should think it over, make some calculations, and then come back with a concrete plan. Kim went home and then returned to Moscow when he had worked everything out. He told Stalin he was absolutely certain of success. I remember Stalin had his doubts. He was worried that the Americans would jump in.… The war wasn’t Stalin’s idea, but Kim Il-sung’s.
Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers
INITIALLY, NEITHER OF THE TWO MAJOR POWERS INTENDED TO become embroiled in a war over Korea. By the beginning of 1950, Rhee, the South Korean strongman, had built up an army of 98,000 men, commanded mainly by Korean officers who had served in the Japanese imperial forces, but his political methods caused such distaste that President Truman was having difficulty getting aid for South Korea approved in Congress. It is entirely plausible, therefore, as Admiral Brock suggests, that Rhee’s army was making attacks a
long the 38th Parallel with the aim of creating a crisis to increase the flow of American aid.
In Moscow, Stalin certainly knew of Kim’s decision to try to reunify the country by a surprise attack on the South, and did not try to talk him out of it. On the other hand, Stalin himself wanted nothing to do with the scheme, which might draw him into a military confrontation with the vastly more powerful forces of the West: he made sure that all Soviet advisers were withdrawn from the country before the North Koreans attacked. (These two explanations for the Korean War—that the South Koreans were trying to provoke the North into a large-scale retaliation along the border, and that Kim was planning an invasion anyway—are not mutually exclusive.)
In June 1950 the North Korean army struck in force all along the 38th Parallel, and had almost complete success. The South Korean army crumbled, Seoul fell, and the North Koreans were soon driving south toward the bottom of the peninsula. Even though General Douglas MacArthur had not thought that Korea was vital to American security, President Truman declared that Korea was “an ideological battleground upon which our entire success in Asia may depend,” and MacArthur, also the allied supreme commander in occupied Japan, immediately began air strikes from Japan against the North Korean tank columns. Troops from the U.S. occupation forces in Japan followed within days. As for consulting with its NATO partners before taking this momentous step.…
We were all summoned to the State Department, and I remember that one of the NATO allies said, “Is this a consultation or information?” and I think it was George Kennan who was holding the meeting on behalf of Dean Acheson, or it may have been Dean Acheson himself, who said, “The President of the United States has informed Congress of the decision of the United States to take military action already, so you can draw your conclusions, gentlemen. It is for you to decide.”
George Ignatieff, External Affairs, 1940–62
Lester Pearson, who had become external affairs minister in the St. Laurent government in September 1948, felt that Canada “had to keep the U.S. action within the framework of the UN.” He needn’t have worried: the Americans were happy to oblige. By the time Truman and all his key advisers had assembled in Washington, they had decided that their response should be characterized as a UN operation. In those days the United Nations still had a positive image in the United States, being largely American-controlled apart from the Soviet veto, and associating the American action with the United Nations would help justify the war to the American people. In addition, the UN label would help in getting other countries more actively involved in the worldwide American crusade against “Communism.”
Truman also knew that the West would not be thwarted at the United Nations by a Soviet veto, since the Soviet Union’s representative, Yakov Malik, had walked out of the Security Council early in the year over a fight about the recognition of China. Moscow wanted the People’s Republic of China (Mao Tse-tung’s Communists, who had won the civil war in 1949) to have China’s seat in the Security Council, but the Americans insisted that Nationalist China keep it, even though the Nationalist forces now controlled nothing except the island of Taiwan. So the Soviet Union was not present to use its veto when the Security Council declared that there had been a breach of the peace and requested aid for South Korea. Ten days later the United Nations Unified Command was created, making the Korean war a UN operation at least in theory, and General MacArthur, who had taken command of U.S. military operations in South Korea on the war’s outbreak, became the UN commander as well.
I considered this to be a very important event; the first time in history, so far as I know, an assembly of nations had formally condemned and voted against an aggressor and, unlike the League of Nations in 1935 and 1936, had followed through.… I have always felt since that, however it worked out in practice, it was a most valuable precedent for the future of the United Nations.
Lester Pearson, “Mike”: Memoirs, vol. 2
“However it worked out in practice.…” There was still, in most Western countries, a conviction that the United Nations had to be made to work, and therefore those countries were psychologically prepared to participate even in a sham collective security operation. But it was a sham. By 1950 the Western majority in the United Nations had, in effect, defined the Soviet Union as an aggressive state against which collective security measures had to be applied, and all other Communist states as mere extensions of Soviet policy. That was not truly the case, but it can be argued that the West needed to create some sort of political structure like NATO in the late 1940s to reassure the beleaguered democratic governments in Europe, even if everybody knew that the Russian tanks were not going to roll. If it had gone no further than that, NATO might have fulfilled the limited tasks that Escott Reid had envisaged for it: containing the Russians and the Americans until things settled down and they both grew up a bit. Then everybody could have got back to the serious business of making the United Nations work. But Korea put paid to all that.
We were always looking for Soviets in Korea, but they didn’t seem to turn up. But the fact was that Korea was regarded as a prime example of the threat of a monolithic Communist movement in the world, and was so represented in Washington.
George Ignatieff
The flagrant aggression of Kim Il-sung was precisely the sort of thing that collective security had to stop if there was to be any hope of a more stable and peaceful world, but the war in Korea was not really a UN operation at all. From start to finish it was an American war fought for U.S. strategic objectives, with some assistance from other NATO members and a few other American allies. The war was waged not against the North Korean aggressor regime but against the “world Communist conspiracy,” and the UN force was actually NATo-in-Asia.
Even worse, the United States exploited the Korean War to do what should never have been done at all: to convert NATO from a political association into a real military alliance, with a joint command, a formal strategic doctrine and heaps of weapons. The Russians still weren’t coming, but by the end of the Korean War NATO had been thoroughly militarized—and it was a very deliberate business on the part of the United States. Within a week of the Korean invasion, U.S. forces were fully committed in Korea and armed with UN credentials to boot. Now, the Truman administration wanted America’s allies to send troops. Before the Canadian government committed itself (some members of cabinet were distinctly reluctant), Pearson made a secret visit to Washington to see Secretary of State Dean Acheson. It was an enlightening trip.
To Mr Acheson the fighting in Korea was only an incident—though politically an incident of great importance—in a very dangerous international situation. This incident had … made it politically possible for the United States to secure Congressional and public support for a quick and great increase in defence expenditures [and] for the imposition of needed controls, higher taxes, the diversion of manpower to the armed forces and defence industries, etc. This will amount to a partial mobilization and will prepare the way for a rapid and complete mobilization in the event of war.
“Mike”: Memoirs, vol. 2
In short, the U.S. State Department was going to use Korea as the excuse and the goad for general rearmament, both in the United States and among its NATO allies. While he would be happy to have a detachment of trained Canadian soldiers in Korea for military reasons, Acheson concluded, he was even more interested in their political value.
The Korean War resembles the Boer War more than any of Canada’s other wars. It was fought far from Canada’s traditional areas of interest, and as Britain had used the South African war to set a precedent for the participation of its overseas dominions in imperial defence, so the United States was using the war in Asia to transform its purely political alliance into a militarily useful organization.
Following Pearson’s interview with Acheson, Ottawa agreed to send some destroyers to the Korean War and to airlift arms and supplies to the South Koreans. The Canadian government hoped that this would satisfy the Americans, for Pearso
n was already having to deny that Canada was merely following “the orders of a single member of the United Nations which has particular interests to safeguard in Korea.” Besides, despite Canada’s commitment to collective security, the country did not have troops available to send to Korea (or anywhere else for that matter).
We had this illusion that collective security was a scheme by which if you say you’re all going to unite against an aggressor, nobody will aggress. You don’t actually have to have forces. We didn’t realize that as members of a UN dedicated to collective security, even as members of NATO, we had to have troops, and we didn’t have them, so it was a very embarrassing month in New York.
John Holmes, Canadian Mission to the United Nations, 1950–51
The request for Canadian ground troops in Korea formally came via UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie, but in fact it came from the United States, whose UN representative, Warren Austin, had told the secretary-general that American support for the United Nations “would be put in jeopardy” if he didn’t make the appeal. The Unified Command being set up in Korea was really just the American command with a few bangles and beads hung on it, but for those Canadians who recalled that a crusading anti-Communist alliance was not what we had been seeking to create in 1945 (or even 1949), there was a soothing source of confusion: the growing tendency to talk about NATO and the United Nations as though they were the same thing.