This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  One by one, Boatner did this to each compound.

  Day by day, he drove his Sherman tanks past the roads near the compounds, and he marched his heavily armed infantry by, showing his force. Day by day he beat the POW's down, without laying a finger on them, without killing one of them.

  Phase I took ten days, and time was running out.

  General Clark flew into Koje-do, accompanied by General Van Fleet. Boatner briefed Clark, while Van Fleet had little to ask or say. When Boatner finished, Wayne Clark said: "Boatner, you're doing exactly what I told you. You can rest assured you'll never get hurt."

  A few days after Boatner took command at Koje, Van Fleet had visited him. At that time the Eighth Army CG said, "You've got to tighten up on security." It was obvious to all that a grapevine ran from Panmunjom and P'yongyang down to Koje-do.

  "Then, General," Boatner said, "I've got to move all these thousands of civilians away from the camps. There's the security problem."

  But Van Fleet argued. "You can't do that."

  So for a few more days the POW camps were surrounded by a raucous throng of hawkers, prostitutes, and probable Communist agents. It was common practice for civilians to throw notes back and forth across the wire with the POW's.

  One day, the correspondents asked Boatner why he permitted this. He told them General Van Fleet's orders. Shortly afterward, Van Fleet's orders were changed.

  Boatner had no legal authority to move the civilians away from the camp—but all it took was a little action. He gave orders that they must not be brutalized, and put trucks at their disposal; in one day and a half, all were moved far away, and not allowed to return. There was no further trouble from that source.

  By this time, the brass studiously refrained from nibbling on Boatner; technically, there were a number of people in the chain of command between him and Mark W. Clark, but each of these, whatever his own notions may have been, was knowledgeable enough to keep his finger out of the pie.

  Phase II, the building of the new compounds, took almost thirty days, while Boatner sweated out each day, expecting trouble to break at any moment. It was not until 10 June 1952 that he was ready to begin Phase III, the breaking up and movement of the existing compounds.

  With this move, he would accomplish three things: the breakup of the tight Communist control organizations in some compounds, the placement of POW's into secure compounds from which they had little chance of escape, and the reducing of the huge, unwieldy compounds into smaller ones more easily managed.

  This had to be done, but he also knew that the Communist leaders would

  resist it to the death.

  Boatner planned and organized the moves as a military operation. Four weeks before, Phase III would have been impossible—but Boatner had used his month well. Not only had he beaten the will of the POW's down day by day; he now had also a completely disciplined, taut American military structure under his command, immediately and efficiently responsive to his order.

  To begin Phase III, Boatner decided to crack the toughest nut first. Compound 76 held the hard-core Communist officers; it had captured Dodd. It was also closest to the U.S. hospital in which were American female nurses. In 76 were the meanest and most vicious POW's, and the best leadership.

  Putting 76 out of operation first, Boatner felt, would go a long way to reducing the others.

  The 187th Airborne and the 38th Infantry dug in two battalions along the road into Compound 76, in plain sight. Also in plain sight, the infantrymen and paratroopers set up machine guns and mortars, laid on the prison camp.

  Then Boatner had the paratroops stage a mock advance into an empty compound next to 76, with fixed bayonets and flamethrowers, while the Communist prisoners watched. The demonstration went like clockwork; it had been timed and scheduled to the second, and every officer briefed on his part.

  The demonstration was both impressive and frightening.

  Then Boatner sent for the senior Korean officer of Compound 76. He told him that the POW's were to be moved, into better quarters. He took him to inspect the new compounds, and told him when and where he would be moved, in an attempt to forestall any panic among the prisoners.

  But the Communist leadership could not be trusted to tell their people the truth. Loudspeakers were set up outside all compounds, and in English, Korean, and Chinese, the same word was put out for the rank and file. The compounds were bluntly warned that they were going to be moved, by force if necessary, and if there was any resistance the POW's would be responsible for the results. Compounds other than 76 were informed so that they would not panic when trouble began in the first one to be moved.

  When the word was out, 9 June 1952, General Boatner's officers reported to him that instead of getting ready to move, the North Koreans in 76 were putting out pickets to see that no one attempted to obey his instructions.

  Early the next morning, 10 June, Boatner and Brigadier General Trapnell, the paratroop commander, stood on a low hill outside Compound 76, watching.

  The troops had their orders; everything had been planned and rehearsed down to the most minute detail. Phase lines within the compound had been drawn, and the troops were to cross them at given times. A large number of paratroops were to be used. Inside the compound, they would operate from a fixed base, sweeping movable forces through the compound to force the POW's out. The paratroops had bayoneted rifles, but no cartridges in the chambers. They could fire only on the express command of an officer.

  With the compound completely ringed by men and steel, the paratroops who were to enter 76 massed. At 0615 they tore down the wire fence, and went in.

  The Koreans fell back, to a preplanned defensive line within the compound. Suddenly, many of them brandished long spears and sharp knives, made in the workshops.

  The paratroops reached Phase Line A, having covered one-eighth of the compound area, without contact, and without result. They moved on, slowly, deliberately, irresistibly, grinding the mass of POw's before them, pushing them around against the fixed base of men set up in one area. At Phase Line B—one half the compound—they began to throw concussion grenades.

  Now the bulk of the POW's began to come apart, to flee before the grim Americans and out into the fields ringed by men and guns. They were pushed on into their new homes.

  But behind a line of trenches they had dug in one section of the compound, 150 holdouts refused to surrender. They screamed and shouted defiance, and waved spears and knives.

  The paratroops advanced, slowly, grimly, pushing them back. Now there was chaos. The POW's had set their huts afire, and smoke blanketed the area, choking men, obscuring vision. In the Korean press, a number of men panicked, and tried to run.

  They were killed by their own people, with spears in the back.

  Then the tough paratroopers met the lines of Koreans, and in a wild melee broke the back of their resistance. At a cost of 43 POW's killed, 135 wounded—half by their own officers—the 6,500 hard-core Communists in 76 were broken down into groups of 500 and placed behind new wire.

  As the resistance ended, Boatner walked into the still-flaming compound, into which no American had gone for days. Not far within the circle of huts he recognized an odor familiar to all men who have intimately known the battlefield: the smell of death.

  Inside a hut, he found a five-day-old corpse, hanging by its heels—a symbol of the Communist determination to dominate, placed there as an example by the leadership.

  And in a ditch, cowering, the paratroopers found Senior Colonel Lee Hak Ku, of the North Korean People's Army; they dragged him out, roughly, and pushed him on his way. Colonel Lee, who had expected to be killed, never afterward gave much trouble.

  Nor did the other compounds, some of whom had witnessed the reduction of 76, and some of whom heard of it on the grapevine, when their own turn came.

  Buried in 76, Boatner's men found two sets of plans. One was the defense plan by which the North Koreans had resisted movement.

  The other was th
e plan for a mass breakout by the dedicated Communists of all compounds, set for 20 June 1952.

  The plans called for the POW's to cut the wire, make for the hills, and slaughter everything in their path.

  The plans, however, were eight days too late. For on 12 June 1952, with the compounds broken up, Brigadier General Bull Boatner was at last in command of Koje Island.

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  37

  Summer, Winter, Spring, and Fall

  The destiny of mankind is not decided by material computation. When great causes are on the move in the world … we learn that we are spirits, not animals, and that something is going on in space and time and beyond space and time, which whether we like it or not, spells duty.

  — From a speech by Winston S. Churchill, Rochester, New York, 1941.

  BY SUMMER 1952, as the rice began to ripen in the muddy brown paddies, and as the Korean valleys, which had been glacial in December, turned into malarial swamps, the only serious obstacle to a cease-fire was the problem of prisoners of war. The armistice line had been drawn, and by that agreement each side had relinquished any wholesale designs on the other's territory.

  But now, with the Communist POW's once again under firm control, the Communist powers could not refute the fact that not more than 83,000 of the 132,000 of their personnel in U.N. hands would voluntarily return to their homelands, and this was a loss of face that they could not accept.

  At Panmunjom, General Harrison had to face every kind of devious tactic, including the most flagrant lies and virulent abuse bordering on the personal. The Communists, who had deeply shocked the U.N. Command with their admission that they themselves held only 12,000 men—leaving thousands of Americans and 250,000 South Koreans, the latter mostly civilians who had disappeared during the Communist occupation unaccounted for—in addition to claiming torture and slaying of their people, also claimed that the U.N. held 40,000 more Communist POW's in secret.

  Whatever heinous act the Communists committed, or intended to commit, they considered it good tactics to accuse the other fellow first.

  Because U.N. POW's had died or disappeared by thousands in their own death camps, it was inevitable that they must accuse the U.N. of the same. But with the failure of planned mass breakout on Koje-do—which might have confused and concealed the real facts forever—it had soon become apparent to the world where the truth lay.

  The International Red Cross, banned from Koje while Haydon Boatner cleaned up the island, returned there on 2 July. And while the IRC handed General Clark a stinging rebuke over the death and injury of certain POW's in the cleanup—which Clark shot back in similar language—neutral observers such as the IRC continued to uphold the U.N.'s word.

  The Communists tried side gambits—in what was now primarily a propaganda war—such as the germ—warfare accusations. While it was true that wholesale epidemics, mainly typhus, raged over North Korea, this was due to the ravages of war, the destruction caused by the continual United States air bombardment, and the passage of huge, unwashed Chinese armies across a land lacking sanitation and medical facilities—not deliberate seeding of virulent bacteria by Americans.

  The Communists were able to back up their accusations with statements by American airmen shot down over North Korea. Under great physical and mental pressure, a number of Americans confessed or otherwise acquiesced that the United States engaged in germ warfare.

  While quite naturally scoffed at in the West, these claims—and their written and pictorial documentation—had great effect in the East.

  After all, every Asian nation was quite aware of who had dropped the first nuclear bomb—and on whom.

  One of the ironic and deeply tragic trends of the middle of the twentieth century was that just as the Westerners were gradually abandoning their own racial shibboleths and awarenesses, the rest of the world was adopting a virulent racial consciousness, which would, however unspoken, color all international policy.

  When hemorrhagic fever—a particularly dreadful and at first fatal disease, causing bleeding from skin and eyeballs—attacked U.N. troops in western Korea, and a research laboratory was set up on a hospital ship off Korea, the ship was branded as a germ-warfare factory. General Harrison, a member of an old and distinguished Virginia family, and a quiet, Christian gentleman, was once provoked to say "that when you deal with Communists, you deal with common criminals."

  General Harrison was wrong—and his error pointed up the dangerous weaknesses of the West in dealing with Communism. The charge of criminal, flung at a Hitler or an Eichmann, clings—because by the ethos of the society in which these men were born, they were criminal—but Communist society does not have a common ethos with the West. It cannot be evaluated by the cultural standards common to the West.

  These vital differences made General Harrison's job at Panmunjom desperately difficult.

  For the United States and its U.N. allies, to be true to their own concepts, could not in conscience do what the Communists now demanded as the price of peace: force their unwilling captives home at gunpoint.

  There was some grumbling inside the United States, and more in Europe, at continuing the war for the sake of a few grubby POW's in Korean stockades, who probably didn't even know their own minds. But the United States Government never wavered.

  And as the State Department reported, regardless of the moral issue, to force the POW's to return would be a propaganda defeat of the utmost magnitude; it would be surrender, and the significance of such breach of faith would not be lost throughout Asia.

  Offering to return only those POW's who desired to return, the U.N. Command reiterated:

  You have been repeatedly informed of the finality of our 28 April proposal … our stand is unshakable. We will not make further concessions. We are, however, always ready to explain the elements of our proposal.

  The answer was no, but the door was still open.

  Now the United Nations Command in Korea recommended to Washington that the POW's who refused repatriation be granted asylum as political refugees, and released in South Korea or on Taiwan, depending on their nationality. For as Edwin D. Dickinson, an authority on international law, wrote in the New York Times, … in the absence of treaty, the competence of states to grant asylum is unlimited.

  States have unlimited right to grant asylum—but no obligation, if they do not choose. Washington rejected the proposal.

  With both sides now intransigent, but still willing to talk, negotiations on the POW question droned through June and July.

  The United Nations Command made further offers: to let the POW's be screened again by neutrals, and by the Communists themselves, in public. The Communist powers screamed foul to each proposal.

  With growing discouragement, the U.N. negotiators began to recess frequently. In all, they threw out three alternative proposals, none of which, however, required an unwilling POW to return home if he did not so desire.

  By early fall it became obvious that the Communist powers were not going to accede to anything short of return of all prisoners. And it had also become obvious that with the United States in the throes of a bitterly disputed presidential election, they preferred to stall, to continue the propaganda war.

  On 8 October 1952, Harrison, now a lieutenant general, stated: "The United Nations Command has no further proposals to make. The proposals we made remain open. The U.N.C. delegation will not come here merely to listen to abuse and false propaganda. The U.N.C. is therefore calling a recess.… We are willing to meet with you again at any time you are willing to accept one of our proposals … which could lead to an honorable armistice. I have nothing more to say."

  The United Nations Command, from Mark W. Clark on down, had had enough of lies, calumnies, sophistry, and flaming propaganda.

  The talks of Panmunjom recessed. They would not begin again, except for liaison meetings, until the following year.

  In the United States, as the day of presidential election neared, there was basic
disagreement, not only between the parties but also within them. This conflict centered on Korea.

  The problem was that the United States seemingly could not win victory, secure an armistice, or get out of Korea. It was a situation the American people had never faced before. It was one that their government had shown no skill for handling since the peace talks began more than one year before.

  The United States was unwilling to accept the losses required in putting new pressure—other than air bombardment—on the enemy, and it was so desirous of peace that it hesitated to rock the boat in any fashion. Thus, the proposal to free the non-Communist POW's was denied, for fear of its effect on the enemy. And the U.N. cloak continued to bind United States operations tightly. To work within the U.N. the nation had to observe that body's wishes, and the U.N. wanted only peace.

  By the fall of 1952, Americans could agree on one thing: that Dean Acheson's remark to Harry Truman in July 1950, "that your decision may not always be the popular one," was the understatement of the decade.

  It was not the decision to intervene in Korea, however, that caused the frustration and anger and disquiet. It was the continuing stalemate. More and more people began to say, "Win it, or get out."

  The anguish of the United States Government, politically unable to win, strategically unable to withdraw, can be easily understood. The government, from failure to understand clearly that Communists negotiate fairly only when it is in their interest to do so, or when unbearable pressure is placed upon them, had clamped itself in a Communist trap. The most difficult thing for all Western statesmen to learn was that there never had been, and probably never would be, a permanent community of interest between themselves and the Communist bloc. The understanding was so often rejected, no doubt, because its acceptance meant that the world was a checkerboard, the pressure unending, and that competition would prevail further than any man could see.