This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  He could never fail to admire the iron discipline and fierce pride the Turks exhibited in the face of the CCF. Years later he would still correspond with some of these men, and from both the Turkish and British governments he would receive commendations for his work with their nationals.

  As the days went by, as each morning Turks came in to greet him gravely with, "Nasa-san, Akadash"—How are you, my friend?—it seemed that captivity would never end. There was no news—but living conditions had improved. Gradually, the Chinese were fattening the POW's up; most of whom were now approaching good health. Most of the POW's felt there must be a reason, and the reason had to be good.

  Schlichter could not know that in California an officer had called on his wife to offer her Schlichter's GI insurance benefit, and his death gratuities. Schlichter had been listed as missing in action for two years, and the government was willing to pay. In tears, Elizabeth Schlichter refused.

  She told the officer that her husband had told her to stay where he had left her, that no matter what, he would come back. In the absence of everything else, she had only this to cling to. Somehow, alone of all those who had known him, she would not believe him dead.

  But suddenly, in April 1953, a number of prisoners were selected to be repatriated, on Little Switch. These were supposed to be the sick and lame, on each side—but the Communists selected mainly men who had no right to go out on those terms; a large number of them were "collaborators."

  It was Communist policy to hold the "reactionaries"—of which Schlichter was one—to the last.

  Schlichter and most of the men at Wewan knew nothing of what was hap- pening at Panmunjom, and elsewhere, that long spring and summer of 1953.

  And then, suddenly, out of a clear sky, they were told, "You're moving." They were taken south to a large collecting point, where hundreds of U.N. prioners of war were being gathered.

  Schlichter saw truckload after truckload of men hauled south from the col- lecting point—but he was told nothing.

  On 6 September 1953, in the morning, he and the men about him were ordered to board a truck. One man suddenly had an intense anxiety reaction; he shouted and broke into a run, and ran headlong into a pole, knocking himself out.

  Schlichter asked an English-speaking Chinese doctor to help this man. It was only when the Chinese shrugged and said his own people would take care of him that Schlichter realized what was coming.

  He could never adequately describe how he felt when he knew he was going home.

  At 1100 his truck pulled up at Panmunjom, the last convoy of American POW's to be exchanged. A huge, moustached Marine master sergeant walked up beside the truck, called out: "I will call out your last name. You will answer with your first name, middle initial, and Army serial number—"

  "Schlichter!"

  Schlichter barked out his response, and stepped down.

  "Sergeant," the big Marine said gravely, "glad to have you home."

  "Fella, you don't know how glad I am," Schlichter said.

  One by one, the last 160 American POW's passed through Panmunjom. These were all men who had been marked as "war criminals" by the enemy—and each of these criminals, before he went on to the tables of fruit juice, milk, and ice cream, glittering in the background, in one way or another, on his knees or otherwise, thanked God that he had returned.

  General Mark W. Clark was there to greet them.

  In this way, Sergeant Charles B. Schlichter, United States Army, returned home. He had done his job. It had taken him 1,010 days to do it.

  On 23 September 1953, with the Korean War already largely forgotten by the people, Schlichter's ship lay just outside San Francisco harbor. It was a cold and dreary day, the Pacific fog thick. But the POW's returning home crowded the decks, straining to see.

  Then the Master's voice boomed over the horn: "Gentlemen, if you will all look forward, you will see something you never thought to see again—"

  And the fog rolled back, and they saw the Golden Gate.

  There was an Air Force band on the dock, playing "God Bless America." Men who had spent a thousand days and nights in Communist prison camps did not think it was corny. Every man Charles Schlichter could see through his own misty eyes was crying.

  The whistles blew, and the band whumped and boomed, and on the dock he saw Elizabeth.

  Some men, no matter how fate deals with them, are fortunate.

  As the truce terms provided, within ninety days of cease-fire all POW's had to be screened and repatriated, or otherwise disposed of. After Big Switch was officially finished, evidence in American hands indicated that the Communists still held 3,404 POW's, 944 of which were Americans.

  The Chinese said they would not repatriate 320, for various reasons. And for various reasons, twenty-three Americans chose to stay with their captors. In neither case was the American Government able to do anything.

  Of the 132,000 Korean and Chinese military POW's taken by the U.N. fewer than 90,000 chose to return home. The Koreans were settled in the Tae-han Minkuk, and some 13,000 Chinese went singing and chanting to Taiwan.

  Each Chinese or Korean who refused repatriation was screened by a neutral commission at Freedom Village, Panmunjom, and his own people allowed to persuade him, while the Indian Army stood guard.

  Watching the Communist tactics, the Indian Army became decidedly anti-Communist, whatever the notions of its government. The Indians had to fly in and out of the Demilitarized Zone—causing the U.N. Command considerable difficulty—since Syngman Rhee refused to allow one Indian soldier to set foot on South Korean soil.

  Among the thousands of Communist POW's on Koje-do had been 474 North Korean female personnel, and the girls had been among the worst of the lot. At about the time Charles Schlichter and his comrades were coming home, these women were put on a South Korean train and sent north to Freedom Village for repatriation. On the way, they broke out Communist flags, and screamed and yelled at the gaping South Koreans alongside the tracks.

  As they neared Panmunjom, they began to tear off their capitalist-made and imperialist-issued clothing, to return home in Communist purity. Then they screamed and shrieked and ripped and tore up the train seats. They urinated on what they could not destroy.

  Finally, before they got off the train, a number of them defecated in the aisles. Men, and women, come home in different ways.

  From the silty Yellow Sea, on the west, to the cold gray waters of the Sea of Japan, on the east, the armies facing each other along the line of contact each withdrew two kilometers to establish the agreed demilitarized zone.

  As the U.N. withdrew, its storied hills—scabrous Baldy, torn Pork Chop, Bloody, Heartbreak, Sniper, Arrowhead, White Horse, Kelly, Nori, The Hook, Gibraltar, and a hundred more—drenched in blood, hallowed by human courage, were abandoned. They lay in no man's land, blasted and reeking symbols of man's interminable collision with man. No monuments would mark them, and no pilgrims would visit their rubbled graveyards.

  With another spring, or perhaps two, the pine and forsythia and wild plum might grow on them once more, thrusting upward green and fresh from the rusting rubble of wire, shards of shells, and moldering bones.

  Except by the men who fought on them, they would be soon forgotten.

  To the north of these hills the truce, hardly signed, had already been violated. New men, new arms, new modern aircraft poured across the Yalu, to new fortified bases deep within the mountains. No man knew when they might be used.

  To the south, many men—only a few Americans, now, and many Koreans—stood uneasy watch, on a forgotten vigil whose end could not be foreseen. The Korean War, never declared, never ended.

  More than two million human beings had died, forty thousand of them American soldiers and airmen, in what was a skirmish, nothing more. Nothing had been won, nothing gained—except that the far frontier had been held.

  At a great price, a little time had been bought. The free peoples of the world might use it badly or well, as they saw fit.r />
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  40

  Lessons

  And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.

  — Matthew, 24:6.

  THE KOREAN WAR ended inconclusively on 27 July 1953. Not until long afterward was it even dignified by the name of war—the governmental euphemism was Korean conflict—and it rapidly became the most forgotten war in American history. There was little in it, from near-disastrous beginning to honorable but frustrating end, that appealed to American sensibilities. Because they cannot look back on it with any sense of satisfaction, or even the haunted pride that a defeated nation sometimes finds, Americans prefer not to look back at all.

  Yet men forget, as always, at their peril.

  There have been millions of words written about the cold war, Communist-Western competition, and Korea. Perhaps, as Major Hanson Baldwin wrote:

  The angry voices speaking shrilly in the land—the carping arguments of men who contend the war was lost and of other men who term Korea "victory"—will pass away. But the deeds of those who fought, the men who died and those who lived, beget their own posterity. Arguments and objectives, grand strategy and national policy, even Korea as a fork in the road of history, may come to have, in future generations, less meaning than the human drama of life and death in the stinking valleys and denuded hills of a peninsula where wars have raged since man first raised fist to man.

  Somehow, the fateful moments when Task Force Smith first sighted the ominous approach of a powerful enemy from its green wet hills through the Korean rain, or when the 5th and 7th Marines understood that they were cut off and surrounded at frozen Yudam-ni or when General Matthew B. Ridgway asked MacArthur if he had permission to attack "if things seemed right"—these moments of life and death and human drama have more historic significance than all the words spoken in Cabinet, all the long communiqués, all the painful hammering out of the policy of containment.

  For every time a nation or a people commits its sons to combat, it inevitably commits its full prestige, its hopes for the future, and the continuance of its way of life, whatever it may be. If the United States ground forces had not eventually held in Korea, Americans would have been faced with two choices: holocaust or humiliation. General, atomic war, in a last desperate attempt to save the game, would have gained Americans none of the things they seek in this world; humiliating defeat and withdrawal from Korea would have inevitably surrendered Asia to a Communist surge, destroying forever American hopes for a free and ordered society across the world.

  A nation that does not prepare for all the forms of war should then renounce the use of war in national policy. A people that does not prepare to fight should then be morally prepared to surrender. To fail to prepare soldiers and citizens for limited, bloody ground action, and then to engage in it, is folly verging on the criminal.

  This, from the scamper at Osan to the bloody withdrawal from the Ch'ongch'on to the heroic resistance at Chipyong-ni, the Imjin, the Soyang, and Pork Chop Hill, is a lesson Americans and others must take from Korea.

  Because the Korean War was not, as most large wars were, the end of an era, but only a bloody skirmish in the middle of the post-World War II age, no definitive history can yet be written. The principal figures of the Korean War are still living, and many are still in power. The game still goes on. Yet Korea set certain patterns for the future.

  The Communist powers, notably Soviet Russia, would remember the rapid escalation from a small, almost civil-type conflict into a large-scale action involving most of the major powers of the world. After Korea, overt, brutal armed aggression, which had produced so violent—and unexpected—a counteraction from the West, would be avoided. Now the emphasis would be on infiltration, subversion, and insurgency to gain Communist ends in the fringe areas; the trick was never again, as with the South Korean invasion, to give the West a clear moral issue.

  Communist planners, studying the lessons of Korea, could not help wondering what the result might have been could they have slipped several North Korean divisions into the South clandestinely, keeping them supplied across a fluid border. They might well wonder if the West would have then sprung to the defense of autocratic old Dr. Syngman Rhee, even though the interests of the West were equally imperiled.

  The Red Chinese, impervious to human loss and suffering, gloried in their sudden leap to large-power status—for by defying the United Nations, and holding the Western armies in check, they became a great power in the East. They learned many of the lessons of modern ground warfare, and proved that Chinese armies could perform creditably in the field. They, more than the Soviets, would be eager to try again, for they had less to lose; but they still could not move without their industrial ally's aid and consent.

  Neither power would desire general war, for both were realists, not perhaps in what they say, but in what they do.

  They were balked, not defeated. Inevitably, they would try again, if not Korea, elsewhere. Within a year after Korean fighting ended, they would succeed in Vietnam, this time without overt aggression.

  From the Korean War the United States drew troubled conclusions. American policy had been to contain Communism along the parallel, and in this, American policy succeeded. But not one realized, at the beginning, how exceedingly costly such containment would be. The war reaffirmed in American minds the distaste for land warfare on the continent of Asia, the avoidance of which has always been a foundation of United States policy. But the war proved that containment in Asia could not be forged with nuclear bombs and that threats were not enough, unless the United States intended to answer a Communist pinprick with general holocaust.

  Yet the American people, Army, and leaders generally proved unwilling to accept wars of policy in lieu of crusades against Communism. Innocence had been lost, but the loss was denied. The government that had ordered troops into Korea knew that the issue was never whether Syngman Rhee was right or wrong but that his loss would adversely affect the status of the United States—which was not arguable.

  That government's inability to communicate, and its repudiation at the polls, firmly convinced many men of the political dangers of committing American ground troops in wars of containment. Yet without the continual employment of limited force around the globe, or even with it, there was to be no order. The world could not be policed with ships, planes, and bombs—policemen were also needed.

  Less than a year after fighting ended in Korea, Vietnam was lost to the West, largely because of the complete repugnance of Americans toward committing a quarter of a million ground troops in another apparently indecisive skirmish with Communism. Even more important, the United States, as the Joint Chiefs of Staff reported, simply did not have the troops.

  Korea, from Task Force Smith at Osan to the last days at Pork Chop, indicates that the policy of containment cannot be implemented without professional legions. Yet every democratic government is reluctant to face the fact. Reservists and citizen-soldiers stand ready, in every free nation, to stand to the colors and die in holocaust, the big war. Reservists and citizen-soldiers remain utterly reluctant to stand and die in anything less. None want to serve on the far frontiers, or to maintain lonely, dangerous vigils on the periphery of Asia. There has been every indication that mass call-ups for cold war moves may result in mass disaffection.

  The United States will be forced to fight wars of policy during the balance of the century. This is inevitable, since the world is seething with disaffection and revolt, which, however justified and merited, plays into Communist hands, and swings the world balance ever their way. Military force alone cannot possibly solve the problem—but without the application of some military force certain areas, such as Southeast Asia, will inevitably be lost.

  However repugnant the idea is to liberal societies, the man who will willingly defend the free world in the fringe areas is not the responsible citizen-soldier. The man who
will go where his colors go, without asking, who will fight a phantom foe in jungle and mountain range, without counting, and who will suffer and die in the midst of incredible hardship, without complaint, is still what he has always been, from Imperial Rome to sceptered Britain to democratic America. He is the stuff of which legions are made.

  His pride is in his colors and his regiment, his training hard and thorough and coldly realistic, to fit him for what he must face, and his obedience is to his orders. As a legionary, he held the gates of civilization for the classical world; as a bluecoated horseman he swept the Indians from the Plains; he has been called United States Marine. He does the jobs—the utterly necessary jobs—no militia is willing to do. His task is moral or immoral according to the orders that send him forth. It is inevitable, since men compete.

  Since the dawn of time, men have competed with each other—with clubs, crossbows, or cannon, dollars, ballots, and trading stamps. Much of mankind, of course, abhors competition, and these remain the acted upon, not the actors.

  Anyone who says there will be no competition in the future simply does not understand the nature of man.

  The great dilemma of our time is that, with two great power blocs in the world, each utterly distrustful of the other, and one, at least, eager to compete, we cannot compete with thermonuclear weapons. Competition, after all, is controlled action or controlled violence for an end, and nuclear weapons do not lend themselves to control. And in nuclear war there is apparently no prize, even for first place.

  Yet men must compete.

  It is still possible that one or both segments of mankind will embark upon what will be the last crusade. It is much more likely that they will collide again on lesser scale, as they have before. But even on a lesser scale the game can be lost, or won.

  We can lose the game not only because of the nature of our enemies, but because of our own. We understand we cannot ignore the competition, and realize with frustration that we cannot end it by putting our competitor out of business with a bang, but we will not willingly face the fact that we may walk along the chasm, beset by tigers, for many years to come.