Until this time, 1953, the armies of the world, including that of the United States, had hardly taken the advent of fissionable material into account. The 280mm gun, an interim weapon that would remain in use only a few years, changed all that, forever. With an atomic cannon that could deliver tactical fires in the low-kiloton range, with great selectivity, ground warfare stood on the brink of its greatest change since the advent of firepower.
The atomic cannon could blow any existing fortification, even one twenty thousand yards in depth, out of existence neatly and selectively, along with the battalions that manned it. Any concentration of manpower, also, was its meat.
It spelled the doom of Communist massed armies, which opposed superior firepower with numbers, and which had in 1953 no tactical nuclear weapons of their own.
The 280mm gun was shipped to the Far East. Then, in great secrecy, atomic warheads—it could fire either nuclear or conventional rounds—followed, not to Korea, but to storage close by. And with even greater secrecy, word of this shipment was allowed to fall into Communist hands.
At the same time, into Communist hands wafted a pervasive rumor, one they could neither completely verify nor scotch: that the United States would not accept a stalemate beyond the end of summer.
The psychological pressures on Chinese Intelligence became enormous. Neither an evaluative nor a collective agency, even when it feels it is being taken, dares ignore evidence.
China, losing the propaganda war, had yet gained tremendous prestige on the Korean battlefield. It had engaged the armies of the West and seemingly fought them to a standstill; it had leaped into great-power status in the Orient in a day. But if the United States threw the weight of its industrial and nuclear power onto the scales, power which so far it had held back, the Chinese gains could vanish even more quickly.
While they still spoke boastfully, in the frozen gardens of Peiping there were men who worried. In addition to military concerns, it had been a bad year economically from the Elbe to the Yalu; in many areas harvests were light, spelling trouble in the months to come.
On 5 March 1953 Joseph Stalin died. And because Stalin, like all dictators, had never really dared plan for his own succession but had systematically destroyed anyone seemingly capable of replacing him, the monolithic structure of Russian Communism was doomed.
Before Stalin was eulogized and in his tomb, the struggle for power within the Kremlin began. Before it was over, far in the future, the foundations of the Soviet state would be shaken to their roots.
And with the news, the satellite states, plagued with shortages and famine, suddenly hopeful, seethed with revolt. In East Germany, restlessness would result in open defiance before summer.
The Soviet state could survive both internal power struggles and satellite revolt, but all factions within the Kremlin had no time now for foreign adventures. For a certain length of time, Russia, still not recovered from the ravages of the Second World War but pushed on by Stalin's steel will, would require a respite, for the steel will was gone.
On 6 March 1953, it was time for the sound of the dove in the land, and the invention of the Peace Offensive.
It was time, now, to tempt fate no longer, and to place certain subtle but unmistakable pressures on the Chinese comrades, who, though concerned, still hated to give up a good thing.
Many things, joined together, now moved the world toward great events. In the spring of 1953, the leaders of the United States and the non-Communist world wanted peace. The Communist leadership desperately needed it.
Suddenly, ironically, there was a community of interest in the world, however fleeting it might be.
In the middle of the night in Tokyo, 28 March 1953, Wayne Clark was called out of bed to receive a message from Peng Teh-huai and Kim II Sung. As Clark groggily scanned the message, replete with the usual Communist complaint, abuse, and prevarication, one paragraph suddenly stood out.
Peng and Kim not only agreed that exchange of sick and wounded POW's was a good idea; they suggested that the plenary sessions at Panmunjom, in permanent recess since 8 October, be resumed at once.
Excited, but with much skepticism, Clark pushed the buttons that made it so. More than anything else, he was wondering what new trick the Communists had up their sleeve.
But on 30 March, Chou En-lai, Foreign Minister of Red China, announced publicly that China and North Korea might accept the idea of a neutral repatriation commission for the screening of all POW's.
At Panmunjom the liaison officers from the north suddenly exhibited an interest in progress never heretofore shown.
President Eisenhower said in Washington that the United States would accept every Communist offer at face value "until it was proved unworthy of our confidence." It was at this time that certain Communist leaders, who had been deeply concerned, began to wonder if Dwight Eisenhower might not genuinely be a man of peace. But the die was cast; in their secret conclaves the decision had already been made. The Communist world would try to salvage as much from Korea as they might, but they would withdraw. The adventure was over.
Because of the Communist salvage operations, the end would not come suddenly, but gradually. Men would still die on the gloomy hills, and fighting would still go on, while the Communists stubbornly tried to gain what they could from the POW debacle, for the Communists could never completely forego testing an opponent's will.
On 11 April, both sides agreed on terms for the exchange of sick and wounded captives. The U.N. would return 5,800; the Communists only 684: 471 ROK's, 149 Americans, and 64 from other nations.
For the first time, Americans had concrete evidence that not all of the 8,000 men they had lost into Communist captivity would return home. They did not yet understand the sickening fact that 58 percent of their men had perished in the dreary camps along the Yalu—and when they did, the moves toward peace were already far advanced, and no disclosures of atrocities could delay them.
Around the world, the hopes for a genuine peace rose. Newsmen flocked to Korea as they had not done since the summer of 1950. And it was while the hopes were highest, and newsmen gathered outside the demilitarized zone, that the Chinese tested the United States for the last time on Pork Chop, and made the dying there doubly cruel.
On 20 April, when Pork Chop had hardly cooled, Operation Little Switch began; the American sick and wounded came home, as Americans thought. It was only later, much after 26 April, when the exchanges ended, that Americans learned that the enemy had not played fair—many of the men exchanged on Little Switch were not hardship cases but those amenable to the Chinese, the "collaborators," whom the Communists expected to give a favorable picture of their captivity on return.
After the waves of sentimentality that poured from the press, any future attempts at wholesale punishment of these weaker prisoners was compromised at the start. The Chinese gambit was highly successful. The American public, understandably, gave its immediate forgiveness to the "sick and wounded," and rightly or wrongly, the military forces could not muster public support for harsh measures against those they claimed had been guilty of misconduct behind the wire.
The day after Little Switch ended, 27 April 1953, negotiations to end the fighting began in earnest. The Communists submitted a six-point proposal, the main points of which were:
All POW's desiring repatriation would be returned home two months following an armistice.
One month later, all others would be sent to a neutral state, where for a period of six months agents of their home countries would be allowed to make explanations to them.
Captives asking for repatriation from the neutral country would be released immediately.
If any POW's remained at the end of six months, the question of their disposal would be submitted to the political conference that was to follow the armistice.
May 1953 was spent in arguing modifications of the above—the United Nations wanted strict time limitations—and hammering out the selection of nations that might sit on the neutral
commission. Late in the month the enemy became more active all along the line, but concentrated on non- American units. Several outposts were lost.
In June, the plenary sessions went into secret meetings, while the enemy launched 104 separate attacks on the U.N. lines, and 131,800 rounds of artillery fell on U.N. lines during a single day. During June, and later in July, the heaviest attacks and fire the enemy had launched in two years crashed against the front, and American opinion was divided. Some felt the Communists were out to wreck the peace talks; others thought they were merely firing up their painfully hoarded ammunition supplies before a truce was signed.
On 4 June the Communists effectively agreed to all major American counterproposals. The way had not been easy; they had fought a rear-guard action all the way, disputing each small point.
In final form, the POW question was settled as follows:
Within two months, each side, without hindrance, would repatriate all POW's desiring return.
A neutral commission would be set up within the demilitarized zone to accept custody of POW's of each side refusing to return. The commission and the POW's would be guarded by Indian troops.
Explanations might be made to reluctant POW's by agents of each side for a period of ninety days, then,
For thirty days, while the POW's continued in Indian custody, a conference would try to settle the eventual disposition of any who still refused to go home.
At the expiration of this time, any POW for whom no provision had been made would be released to civilian status.
The International Red Cross would assist those released to find new homes, if no other provisions had been made.
Now, with the Communists and the U.N. in agreement, only the Republic of Korea and aging Syngman Rhee stood in the way of armistice. And during the days of June, Syngman Rhee alternated between despair and defiance.
Emotionally and politically, Syngman Rhee could not accept the armistice terms. They left his nation and people divided; they left a million South Kore ans dead seemingly in vain. Americans who grew bitter at old Syngman Rhee during these days, when it seemed he might wreck the peace, should have been able to imagine what Abraham Lincoln would have felt, or done, had Britain and France imposed an armistice upon the United States in 1863, leaving it forcibly divided, perhaps forever.
The tragedy of Syngman Rhee and the Taehan Minkuk was simple—while they could not go on fighting without American support, acceptance of the truce doomed the Korean people to permanent division, and the Taehan Minkuk to continued existence as a rump state, permanently incapable of sup- porting itself economically.
Every American pressure, from cajolery to blunt talk, was used to make Syngman Rhee come around. Rhee continued the same refrain in reply: Never, never, never.
Then, on 18 June, Rhee almost destroyed the armistice. He removed South Korean troops from Clark's command, and ordered the release of 27,000 anti-Communist Korean POW's held in camps in the Pusan area. Most of these POW's melted immediately into the Korean population, and many, inducted into the ROK Army, came back as guards for the few who had not escaped.
In Korea, American guards whose heads had been kept down by South Korean fire while the POW's broke out, as at Camp Number 5, Wonju, regarded the release as a big joke. Shortly after the mass uproar at Wonju, when thousands of POW's had run out, South Koreans and American sergeants threw a big party, using up the stock of the N.C.O. club.
But in Washington, for a time, there was consternation. Criticism of Rhee poured in from all over the world. The Communists screamed in self- righteous agony, even though none of the men released would have ever been returned to them. And the Communists asked some very disturbing questions: Could the United States control its Korean ally if Syngman Rhee refused to accept truce?
But, significantly, the Communists directed their anger and propaganda diatribes not at the United States but at the "murderer Rhee." They still wanted cease-fire.
Walter S. Robertson, Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, was dispatched by the President to Seoul. He arrived in the Korean capital 25 June 1953, the third anniversary of the Communist invasion, and across every thoroughfare Walt Robertson saw antiarmistice streamers and printed slogans. Many of them cried, Don't sell Korea, in English.
Thousands of demonstrators, on order of the ROK Government, poured through the streets. They shouted "Puk chin! Puk chin!—Go north!"
Outside the correspondents' quarters, hundreds of schoolgirls sat in the dirt, and wept.
For twelve days Robertson and Rhee engaged in what came to be called the Little Truce Talks. For the United States now had to make peace also with its Korean ally. And the Taehan Minkuk's price was high, despite the fact that it had no hope of going north without the United States Army, and that the United States could sell it or not, regardless of how its young women wept.
However painful, Korea, a helpless nation, had to accept the fact that it was to be the principal loser of the Korean War. But in return Rhee got the promise of a U.S.-ROK Mutual Security Treaty, agreement to expand the ROK Army to twenty divisions, at American expense, and long-term economic aid, with a down payment of $200,000,000 and 10,000,000 pounds of food, worth $9,500,000, at once.
In exchange for peace along the parallel, the United States agreed to accept the Republic of Korea as its ward, perhaps forever. For without the United States the Taehan Minkuk could not exist.
In exchange, Syngman Rhee agreed not to obstruct the armistice. He would not sign—nor did South Korea ever ratify the eventual agreement—but he would now support a cease-fire.
While Robertson and Rhee bargained, the Chinese, angered, threw vicious pressure against the line, at a cost to the U.N. of nine hundred casualties per day. A massive offensive crashed against the ROK zones, rendering two ROK divisions unfit for further combat, though the fixed position of Chinese artillery, buried underground, and the quick maneuver of American divisions in support stopped any hope of a CCF breakthrough.
Though the pressure was against the ROK's, American and other U.N. units were caught in the backwash. American artillery units supporting the ROK's were overrun; American tankers with ROK infantry were lost in a Chinese sea. These men, those who survived, would never afterward be admirers of President Rhee.
But the CCF had proved its point, and perhaps taught the ROK's a lasting lesson—without outside aid, the Republic of Korea not only could not mount an offensive; it could not even hold its own frontier.
In this way, with the battlefront ablaze, with most Americans, the scent of peace entrancingly before them, uncaring of the gaping losses inflicted on the ROK's, the final negotiations went forward. The United Nations on 19 July gave the Communist powers solemn assurance that the Republic of Korea would not upset the terms already agreed upon.
Along the weary battle line, green and hot now with the midsummer of 1953, U.N. troops licked their wounds and wondered if they dared hope. A hundred times in two years the peace rumors had waxed strong; a hundred times they had been cruelly dashed. And while they wondered, the big guns continued to flame.
But the talking was done. Each side had accepted a situation that was virtually unchanged from what it had been on 11 July 1951, a truce line upon which they had agreed 27 November 1951, and a POW question that they had settled on 4 June 1953, after each of which dates thousands of men, on either side, had continued to be maimed and killed.
Each side had, perhaps, learned something: the Communists, that the will of free men is not easily broken, even when they are of peaceful intent; the West, that the Communist world holds human life cheaply, if there is aught to be gained.
For that knowledge, and little else, many men, of all nations, had died.
On Monday, 27 July 1953, Lieutenant General William K. Harrison, of the United Nations Command, and Nam II, of North Korea, entered the wooden building the Communists had erected at Panmunjom during the long 1952 recess, from which the Picasso doves had been removed at U.N. deman
d. At 1001 they signed the first of eighteen documents prepared by each side. It took them twelve minutes to sign them all. Then, each man got up and left the building, without speaking.
Later, the documents, in English, Chinese, and Korean, were signed by Kim II Sung, Peng Teh-huai, and Mark Wayne Clark.
Wayne Clark, putting away the golden pen the Parker Company had sent him specially for the signing, said: "I cannot find it in me to exult in the hour.… If we extract hope from this occasion, it must be diluted with recognition that our salvation requires unrelaxing vigilance and effort."
Now, to the units along the line came the words, "Shoot 'em up, boys—it's done!"
In a burst of wild enthusiasm—yet restrained, in many men, as it was in General Clark, by a certain sadness—the U.N. units burned up what ammunition they had on the ground.
For the last time—all men hoped—the dark Korean hills rocked with flame and noise.
Then, twelve hours after the pens scratched at Panmunjom, the hills lay quiet. At sea ships put back from the cold gray waters off North Korea, and the silvery aircraft stood silent on their fields.
There was no more war—but there was no peace. There was no victory.
It was called cease-fire.
At Prisoner Camp Number 4, Wewan, Sergeant Charles Schlichtef had been handling sick call for POW Company 1 since August 1952. He had Turks, British, French, Niseis, and Puerto Ricans, with all of whom, in varying degrees, he had made friends.
With some of the Turks, especially Beli Hassan, and Hilmi Andranali, the sergeant who interpreted for him with the Turks, while Schlichter spoke to the Chinese doctors in English, he became very friendly.
This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History Page 66