by Philip Short
Korea changed all that. The US might turn a blind eye to what all sides agreed was a continuation of the Chinese civil war. It could hardly do the same when a Soviet client-state in the northern part of the Korean peninsula undertook armed aggression against what was in effect a US protectorate in the south.63 On June 27, Washington announced that it would send troops to support South Korea's Syngman Rhee, and, for good measure, that the US Seventh Fleet would neutralise the Taiwan Straits.
Mao's initial response was limited. Chinese anti-aircraft units were moved to the North Korean side of the border to defend the bridges across the Yalu River, and reinforcements were sent from the south to Manchuria, on the grounds that, as one Chinese commander put it, ‘one must prepare an umbrella before it rains’. The plan to attack Quemoy was put on indefinite hold.64
At the end of July, however, as the North Korean forces continued their triumphant march southward, Mao began to grow alarmed. He could see, as Kim Il Sung could not, that the Korean lines were becoming overextended and vulnerable to an American counter-attack. At a Politburo meeting on August 4, Mao raised for the first time the possibility that Chinese forces might have to intervene directly to help the North Koreans, even at the risk of US nuclear retaliation. The problem, he told his colleagues, was that if the Americans won, their appetite would grow with eating. China would face the threat of US air raids against Manchurian and east China coast cities; amphibious attacks by nationalist units across the Taiwan Straits; even, perhaps, a combined operation involving the French forces fighting Ho Chi Minh's armies across China's southern border in Vietnam.
Two weeks later, Mao's fears deepened. One of Zhou Enlai's military analysts was convinced that the US Commander, General Douglas MacArthur, would make his move at Inchon, on the narrow waist of Korea, just south of the 38th parallel, the nominal dividing line between North and South. When Mao looked at the map, the young analyst convinced him too. He ordered the PLA to deploy another half-million men along the Manchurian border, and to begin planning for a war lasting at least a year.
At the same time, he sent Kim an urgent warning.
Strategically the United States was indeed a paper tiger, he said. But tactically ‘the United States is a real tiger and capable of eating human flesh’. The Koreans should regroup and prepare to beat off an amphibious assault: ‘From a tactical point of view, sometimes retreat is better than attack … Your enemy is not an easy one. Don't forget, you are fighting the chief imperialist. Be prepared for the worst.’
Kim ignored him. So did Stalin. On September 15, the Inchon landings began, and the North Korean army disintegrated. In Pyongyang, there was panic. Kim sent two of his top lieutenants to Beijing with a frantic plea for help. Stalin added his voice, offering Soviet air cover if Mao would send in ground forces to prevent a Korean collapse.
The next few weeks were the worst Mao had faced since the traumatic months following the Japanese surrender in 1945. He barely slept. On the one hand, he told Gao Gang, whom he had placed in charge of war-preparedness in Manchuria, there appeared to be no way to avoid intervention. On the other, China desperately needed peace for economic reconstruction. The country had been ravaged by war ever since the fall of the Qing dynasty, almost forty years earlier. The communists still had to recover Tibet and Taiwan and, within China proper, hundreds of thousands of bandits and remnant nationalist soldiers were roaming the countryside; industry was in ruins; there was massive unemployment in the cities, and famine in the central plains.
Even in Beijing, food was in short supply. The stock of goodwill the regime had acquired by ending nationalist corruption, stabilising the currency and restoring basic services had already been used up.
None the less, by the end of September, the die was cast.
Mao's military planners estimated that China would lose 60,000 dead and 140,000 wounded in the first year. The Americans enjoyed superior weaponry; but the PLA was better motivated, had greater reserves of manpower, and was better at the ‘jigsaw warfare’ which would occur when there was no stable front. The Chinese armies should therefore adopt the traditional Maoist tactic of ‘concentrating superior forces against weaker ones’ and fighting battles of annihilation, to maximise US casualties and erode American public support for continuing the war. The optimum time for Chinese entry, they concluded, would be shortly after US units crossed the 38th parallel into the north, because at that point the American supply lines would be stretched to the maximum, Chinese forces would still be close to their rear base, and politically Chinese intervention would be easy to justify.
On September 30, the first South Korean units crossed into North Korea. Twenty-four hours later, as the Chinese leaders celebrated the first anniversary of the People's Republic, Kim sent a special plane to Beijing with a hand-carried message, admitting that he was on the verge of defeat. ‘If attacks north of the 38th parallel continue,’ he wrote grimly, ‘we shall not be able to survive relying merely on our own strength.’
Next day, Mao told an enlarged meeting of the Secretariat:II
The question now is not whether but how fast we should send troops to Korea. One day's difference will be crucial … Today we will discuss two urgent questions: when our troops should enter Korea, and who should be the commander.
But if, for Mao, intervention had become inevitable, it did not mean that the rest of the leadership immediately rallied to his views. When the full Politburo met, on October 4, the majority was against him, for the same mixture of economic and political reasons that he himself had weighed in August.
Lin Biao was particularly sceptical. If Kim were going to be defeated, he argued, China would do better to draw a defence line at the Yalu River, and let the North Koreans mount guerrilla actions from Manchuria to recover their lost land. Mao was unimpressed. That way, China would abandon the initiative, he replied. ‘We would have to wait [on the Yalu] year after year, never knowing when the enemy will attack.’ Lin had been Mao's first choice to command the Chinese intervention force, but had declined on grounds of ill-health. Now Mao proposed instead that the command should go to Peng Dehuai. Peng had arrived at the meeting late, having flown in from Xian. But he agreed with Mao's analysis that the United States would not be stopped by concessions, and when the discussion resumed, the following afternoon, his support helped secure a consensus in favour of military action.
Two days later, the first US troops – the American First Cavalry Division – crossed the 38th parallel, and Washington persuaded the UN to endorse Korean unification as its final goal. On Sunday, October 8, Mao issued the formal decree creating a Chinese expeditionary force to go to North Korea's aid. It would be known as the Chinese People's Volunteers, to underline that its mission was in the nature of a moral crusade, based on communist solidarity, and, more importantly, to maintain the fiction that Beijing's intervention was unofficial, and could not therefore justify American retaliation against Chinese cities. The force was to start crossing the Yalu River on October 15.
Then abruptly, three days before the expedition was to begin, Mao ordered all troop movements halted and summoned Peng back to Beijing ‘to reconsider the [intervention] decision’.
The problem, as ever, was Moscow. A crisis had erupted over Soviet military support. On October 1, Stalin had cabled Mao from his Black Sea villa at Sochi, where he was vacationing: ‘I see that the situation of our Korean friends is getting desperate … I think that you should move at least five or six divisions towards the 38th parallel at once.’ In Mao's mind, this tripped an alarm. The problem was not Stalin's request. What worried him was the Soviet leader's silence about the undertakings the Russians had given, in the panicky days after Inchon, to provide Soviet air cover and military supplies.
Mao decided to bluff. He replied that a majority of the Chinese Politburo opposed intervention, and that he was sending Zhou Enlai for urgent consultations.
They met in Sochi on October 10. On Mao's instructions, Zhou presented what amounted to an ultimatum. China, he told S
talin, would respect the Soviet Union's wishes. If the Russians were willing to provide air cover and a massive infusion of weaponry, the Chinese would intervene. Otherwise, Mao would defer to Stalin's judgement and call the whole thing off. Then he sat back to wait for the old dictator's response.
To Zhou's horror, Stalin simply nodded.
If the Chinese felt it was too difficult to intervene, he said in substance, North Korea would have to be abandoned. Kim Il Sung could resort to partisan warfare from bases in Manchuria.
Zhou's hand had been trumped. In the ten hours of talks that followed, ending with a drunken banquet that broke up at 5 a.m., he was able to obtain some fresh assurances, conveyed to Mao in a cable which both he and Stalin signed, that Russia would provide needed weaponry and air defence for Chinese cities. But there would be no Soviet air cover over Korea, at least for the first two months. Stalin's excuse was that the Soviet air force needed time to prepare. In fact he had got cold feet. If Soviet pilots took part, the risk of escalation leading to direct conflict with the Americans was too great. In any case, Soviet involvement had never been part of Stalin's game plan. From the outset, he had seen the war in Korea as an opportunity to get America bogged down in an exhausting conflict with the North Koreans and, if all went well, with the Chinese too. That was why he had refused to allow the Soviet Ambassador at the UN to veto the Security Council's decision to authorise military intervention. Allowing America to ‘commit new stupidities’, he had explained to the Czech President, Klement Gottwald, that August, would undermine the United States’ prestige and distract American attention from Europe, where Moscow would have a freer hand. ‘Does this help us out in terms of the balance of world forces?’ he asked. ‘Absolutely it does.’65
For Mao, the Soviet leader's decision to renege on military commitments made only weeks earlier was the bitterest of all Moscow's betrayals.
At Xian in 1936 and in Manchuria in 1945, all that had been at stake were the political interests of a Chinese Party still struggling for power. But now China was a sovereign state, and Russia a treaty ally. ‘Lean to one side’ or not, the Soviet Union, Mao concluded, would never be a partner China could trust.
For 36 hours, Mao hesitated. On October 12, he drafted a telegram to Stalin, saying that China would not intervene, but ordered it not to be sent. Stalin took his silence to mean that anyway, and sent a message to Kim Il Sung, advising him to prepare to evacuate North Korea. But China was too deeply committed for there to be any real of changing course. Mao was forced to recognise that his bluff had been called. That night he sent word that the intervention would go ahead anyway. Stalin, despite himself, was impressed. ‘So the Chinese really are good comrades!’ he was quoted as saying.66
Mao's troubles were still not over. The army commanders in the north-east were deeply alarmed by the prospect of exposing their men to American bombardment without air cover of any kind. On the 17th, they sent Peng Dehuai a joint message, proposing that China's entry into the war be postponed until the following spring. But with the South Koreans already at the gates of Pyongyang, that was not an option. Next day, after hearing Peng's report, Mao told his colleagues: ‘No matter what the difficulties, we should not change [our] decision … nor should we delay it.’ At Mao's proposal, it was agreed that the Volunteers should begin moving into Korea under cover of darkness on the 19th. Thirty hours later, at around midnight, the Chief of the General Staff, Nie Rongzhen, informed him that the troops were crossing the Yalu as planned. For the first time in weeks, Mao had a proper night's sleep.
Once the decision-making was over, the war itself was brutally simple.
After initial skirmishing at the front in late October and early November, Peng ordered a general retreat. MacArthur then launched an all-out offensive to reach the Yalu River, under the slogan, ‘Get the boys home by Christmas!’. As the Americans would soon discover, Mao was playing his old game of ‘luring the enemy in deep’. At dusk on November 25, the Chinese counter-attacked. Ten days and 36,000 enemy casualties later (including 24,000 US troops), Peng's forces retook Pyongyang.
It was not a perfect campaign. Chinese casualties were high, and the men suffered appallingly from the cold and from lack of food. None the less, seven weeks after entering the war Peng's ‘volunteers’ had recaptured virtually all of North Korea.
At this point, Peng proposed a halt until the following spring. Mao pressed for a further advance. The Russians had begun providing limited air cover and, with the campaign now succeeding, Stalin had promised improvements in military resupply. Peng dragged his feet, but, at Mao's urging, reluctantly ordered a new offensive to start on New Year's Eve, when there would be a full moon, facilitating night operations, and the Americans would be busy with year-end festivities. Five days later, Chinese and North Korean forces captured the South Korean capital, Seoul, now a deserted shell of burnt-out buildings and rubble-filled streets, and forced the Americans back a further eighty miles to the south. But then, again, Peng halted. Kim Il Sung was furious and complained to Stalin. The Soviet leader, however, supported Peng's decision. Stalin's goal was not victory but an indefinite war of attrition.
A month later, the Americans counter-attacked. Peng proposed a withdrawal, trading territory for time, following Mao's own hallowed precept which had served the communists so well against Chiang Kai-shek and Japan. But Mao forbade it. He wanted to hold on to Seoul and the 38th parallel, whose capture had become a powerful symbol, both at home and abroad, of Red China's newfound strength.
In cable after cable, Peng tried to explain why this was unrealistic. ‘Boots, food and munitions have not been provided,’ he told Mao. ‘The men cannot march barefoot in the snow.’ With temperatures falling to –30 centigrade, thousands died of exposure.
For the first time in Mao's long career, he had allowed political considerations to cloud his military judgement.
In the end, not only was Seoul abandoned, but with it the eastern part of the 38th parallel and a large swathe of territory further north. In little more than four months, the Chinese Volunteers lost 140,000 men. The Americans built a strongly fortified defence line along the 38th parallel, and the war settled into seesaw battles around the two sides’ existing positions. Truce talks opened in July 1951, but neither side was yet willing to admit that it had had enough. Not until two years later, after the death of Stalin and the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, as the new US President, were the Americans and the Chinese able, over the objections of both their Korean clients, to end the blood-letting and allow an armistice to be signed.67
Peng and the other Chinese commanders, who had experienced at first hand the effects of advanced military technology, came away from Korea convinced that warfare had fundamentally changed. Peng would spend the next five years as Defence Minister trying to transform the PLA into a modern, professional force.68
Not Mao. To him, the fact that poorly armed Chinese troops had fought the cream of the US Army to a standstill merely confirmed his belief that will-power, not weapons, decided the outcome of wars. ‘We have won a great victory,’ he exulted that autumn:
We have taken the measure of the US armed forces. If you have never taken them on, you are liable to be scared of them … [Now we know] US imperialism is not terrifying, nothing to make a fuss about … The Chinese people are now organised, they are not to be trifled with. Once they are provoked to anger, things can get very tough.69
Mao's impatience in the early stages of the conflict for quick, dramatic results was part of a wider pattern. Now that China had ‘stood up’, he yearned for a renewal of its ancient grandeur. Korea, like Vietnam, had been for centuries a tributary state. In the autumn of 1950, China had gone to war not merely to prevent a hostile, pro-American government taking power just across the Yalu River. National security, in a deeper sense, required the restoration of that suzerain relationship. For the same reason, Mao had sent military advisers to work with Ho Chi Minh's armies. Vietnam, too, had to be brought back i
nto the Chinese fold.70
After the war in Korea, America was no longer the only ‘paper tiger’ in Mao's book. China's attitude to the Soviet Union underwent a sea change. By preventing a North Korean defeat, China had come to Russia's rescue. Stalin's successors viewed Mao's regime with new respect, tinged with some apprehension. If a weak China could act so boldly, what future for its partnership with Russia once it became strong? To Mao, on the other hand, Moscow's stock had fallen. Not only had the Russians been devious, by manoeuvring China into a conflict it would have preferred to avoid, but they had shown themselves undependable and, ultimately, weak.71
Outwardly, nothing changed. China needed Soviet aid to rebuild its economy. In the Cold War of the 1950s, there was nowhere else it could turn. But the seeds of contempt had been sown.
When the final tally was made, China had suffered at least half a million casualties in Korea, including 147,000 dead.72 Among the latter was Mao's eldest son, Anying.
Since returning from Moscow, five years earlier, Anying had worked among the peasantry – renewing his Chinese roots, as his father put it – and then at a Beijing factory, where he became Deputy Secretary of the Party branch. In the autumn of 1950, with Mao's reluctant acquiescence, he volunteered for duty in Korea. While in the Soviet Union, he had studied military science and in 1944 had spent four months as a cadet on the Byelorussian Front. However, Peng Dehuai turned down his request to serve with an infantry regiment, thinking that it was too dangerous, and named him instead to a post on his own staff as a Russian-speaking liaison officer. On November 24, 1950, less than five weeks after Chinese units crossed the border, Peng's headquarters, in an abandoned gold-mine, were attacked by US bombers. Peng himself and most of his staff took refuge in a tunnel. Anying and another officer were trapped in a wooden building on the surface. It was hit by an incendiary bomb. Both men were killed.
That afternoon, Peng sent Mao a telegram, announcing the young man's death and proposing that he be buried on the battlefield, like all Chinese soldiers in Korea. When Mao's secretary, Ye Zilong, received it, he telephoned Zhou Enlai, who contacted other leaders. They authorised the burial, but decided that, with the war at a critical juncture, Mao should not be told.