When Van Fleet arrived at Koje-do, he delayed attacking the compound until heavy armor arrived from the mainland. Meanwhile, negotiations to save Dodd were under way through Brigadier General Charles F. Colson, a staff officer suddenly vaulted into command of the Koje camp. It was not the mere seizure of Dodd that was at issue, but what the Communists could make of it. Under the direction of Pak, the political commissar, a statement in fractured English was proposed in which the U.N. command would agree to stop using “poison gas, germ weapons, experiment object of A-Bomb”—and, to stop screening prisoners for repatriation. After several days of exchanging drafts with the Communists to determine their price for Dodd's release, Colson signed a statement assuring that in the future, “the prisoners of war can expect humane treatment” and promising that after Dodd's release, “there will be no more forcible screening” of any prisoners. Dodd was released May 11. The next day Ridgway turned over his command to Clark.
Colson had no idea that his words would be used against the Allies in negotiations or in press and propaganda the world over to undercut the last remaining principle for which the Allied troops were fighting: the right of voluntary repatriation. Clark later overrode a court of inquiry that largely exonerated Dodd and Colson. He appointed his own court, which demoted each to colonel. They were then exiled to rear-echelon jobs in Japan, and their military careers were effectively ended. General Yount, the Pusan base commander, received a reprimand for not keeping closer surveillance over the negotiations, although it is hard to see why he was brought in except to increase the number of scapegoats for the omissions of higher headquarters. Clark wrote later that he would have “let them keep that dumb son of a bitch Dodd, and then go in and level the place.”
In the denouement, that is more or less what happened, although happily for Dodd, he was well out of the way. On May 13, wasting no time, Clark sent in Brigadier General Haydon “Bull” Boatner, assistant commander of the 2nd Division and an old China hand who had served in World War II under Vinegar Joe Stilwell. He spoke Chinese fluently, understood the Asian sense of hierarchy and face, and was not an especially nice man. John E. Murray, whose warnings had gone for nothing, recalled years later in his own retirement as a major general that Boatner's large round face with its thin lips “always looked like he was ready to spit.” Boatner was not very smart, either. As Major General Thomas Watlington remarked in a letter to Murray, “I have known three ‘Bulls’ in the Army, and all were nicknamed not for their size but their brains. I cannot truthfully say that Boatner is the most stupid of the three, for comparison of superlatives is not easy.”
But Boatner did not have to be particularly smart; he merely had to know precisely what his orders were and carry them out efficiently. Clark told him he was “to regain control of the rebellious prisoners on Koje and maintain control thereafter.” His policy was sharply enunciated after he received a demanding message from one prisoner compound. “Prisoners of war do not negotiate,” Clark shouted at a surprised subordinate. Boatner quickly set about building stronger, smaller prison enclosures, each holding between 500 and 1,000 men, as International Red Cross representatives had previously recommended in vain. To start the transfer, he baited the Chinese prisoners by expressing amazement that they would take orders from Koreans, who were descendants of their former slaves. Meanwhile, he received reinforcements in the form of paratroopers of the 187th Regimental Combat Team, one of the best battle-tested units in Korea. Clark later wrote, “Staff planning for this operation was done as carefully as for any orthodox military campaign. We knew by this time that the Communist POWs were active combatants and had to be dealt with as soldiers, not as prisoners in the traditional sense.”
In an initial feint, Boatner sent infantrymen and tanks to pull down the Communist signs and banners in several compounds, demonstrating that he intended to regain control. On June 10 he massed his forces directly against the enemy command, ordering Colonel Lee to assemble the prisoners of his Compound 76 in groups of 150 for transfer to new quarters. They rallied with homemade barbed-wire clubs and flails, tent-pole pikes, and Molotov cocktails made from hoarded cooking gasoline. Half an hour after the first order, disciplined troops of the 187th advanced, using concussion grenades, tear gas, bayonets, and their fists, but not firing a shot. The first prisoners were hauled from the trenches, and hundreds more were moved out by riot tactics. After Patton tanks trained their guns on the last holdouts, they gave up; Colonel Lee was dragged away by the seat of his pants to solitary confinement for the remainder of the war. The remaining compounds were broken up, and little more was heard from Koje-do thereafter, although the issue of forced repatriation continued to the last.
A year later, when peace was finally imminent, South Korean president Syngman Rhee tried to block an armistice that would not give him the entire country. Once again, the prisoners were the markers in his gamble. Just after midnight on June 18, South Korean guards opened the gates of camps holding about thirty-five thousand North Korean POWs. They vanished into the night with the help of South Korean soldiers, who led them to hiding places and fed them. Only about nine thousand hard-core Communist POWs refused to leave, insisting on repatriation. To Rhee's chagrin, the Communist side shrugged off his provocation. An armistice was signed on July 27, 1953, leaving North and South split along the battle line, which became a demilitarized zone.
The armistice provided for a complex process of what was called “explanation” by representatives of both sides to persuade prisoners to remain or go home. But inside the barbed wire, the prisoners had chosen up sides long before, and there was no going back. LSTs brought the North Korean prisoners from Koje to Inchon on August 13, where they boarded trains for the exchange point at the demilitarized zone. The windows had been covered with wire mesh, and the Communists were warned against revealing themselves along the route. Nevertheless, they cut up their underwear, turned it into North Korean flags using dye hidden in their caps, pulled off the windows' mesh protection, and waved the improvised red-and-blue banners out the train win-dows—to an angry shower of stones thrown by schoolchildren along the route. North Korean female prisoners trashed their railroad car by smashing the windows, slashing the seat covers, urinating on the upholstery, and then, as they left, defecating in the aisle.
Defiance marked every moment of the North Koreans' return. At the demilitarized zone, Communist Red Cross officials urged the prisoners to get rid of the uniforms that their captors had provided. They stripped themselves naked except for their Communist caps, GI shoes, and breechclouts made from towels. Snake-dancing, singing, and yelling, they were loaded onto trucks for the exchange point, whereupon they began throwing away their shoes along the dusty road to the North and repatriation.
These antics proved the futility of the exercise to the man who had conducted it, Vice Admiral C. Turner Joy, the chief Allied truce negotiator. One of his main objectives in holding out against forced repatriation had been the hope that Communist regimes would be so gravely embarrassed by mass defections that they would be undermined. “I regret to say this does not seem to have been a valid point,” the admiral later remarked drily. “Whatever temporary loss of prestige in Asia Communism suffered from the results of ‘voluntary repatriation’ has long since been overtaken by Communism's subsequent victory in the area.”
He spoke too soon. If there is any military lesson in all of this, and indeed in the Korean War itself, it comes from turning on its head General MacArthur's famous dictum: “There is no substitute for victory.” The prosperity of South Korea today, the visible crumbling of the regime in the North, and China's fundamental turn toward a market economy prove that there is a substitute: constancy of purpose, patience, and avoiding the chimera of mistaking propaganda victories for real ones. Commanders win when they recognize that tactics and politics are simply different sides of the same strategic coin, and then, as Clark did, take the political measure of their opponents. By applying just the right amount of force, to bluff an
d stiff his opponents and then wait them out, he proved a far better Cold War general than he ever was in World War II. It is a military lesson that holds good in any war, hot or cold.
Strategic View: The Meaning of Panmunjom
ROBERT COWLEY
The early 1950s were an interval of mixed—and missed—historical signals. The Korean War, the most potentially explosive confrontation of the decade, had frozen along trench lines that might not have seemed out of place on the Great War's Western Front. Increasingly displeased with the sterile results of the Korean standoff, the American public waited in vain for some small frisson of hope to emerge from the hutments of Panmunjom, where negotiations for an armistice had consumed over a year without result. It was no wonder that Dwight D. Eisenhower's stunning statement on October 24, 1952, “I shall go to Korea,” clinched his campaign for the presidency. Eisenhower didn't say what he would do there or exactly how he intended to wrap up the conflict; the simple words seemed enough. And, once elected, he did go. He looked around with his trained general's eye, noting that “small attacks on small hills would not win this war.” A big offensive might produce big gains, but it might also bring in Soviet troops and tanks. Better to leave matters as they were and try to resusitate the Panmunjom negotiations. He stayed away from the place on purpose.
Then fate, in the form of actuarial probability, gave Eisenhower the advantage he needed a month and a half after he had taken office. On March 5, 1953, Stalin died, succumbing to a stroke in his fortresslike dacha outside of Moscow. The Pope of World Communism had been seventy-three. Even as he had lain unconscious, the struggle for succession began. The man who briefly emerged on top was Georgi Malenkov, but as the months passed, his hold on power became increasingly shaky. Malenkov spoke hopefully of “peaceful coexistence” with the West and made noises about a summit conference. Eisenhower stalled. He and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, feared that the Soviets might use it as a platform for blocking the rearmament of West Germany.
The bare-knuckled infighting for political supremacy continued behind the walls and closed doors of the Kremlin. Almost unnoticed, the rise of Nikita Khrushchev began. Lavrenti Beria, the man who had engineered Stalin's Great Terror and who had later presided over the successful creation of a Soviet atomic bomb, was himself arrested and accused of having been a British spy for thirty years. He confessed, of course, and was executed before the year was out.
Stalin's death and the leadership turmoil in Moscow did release the peace process from the frigid grasp of the old dictator. He had viewed Korea as a learning experience for the Chinese, and, as he cabled Mao, the war “shakes up the Truman regime in America and harms the military prestige of the Anglo-American troops.” As for the North Koreans, they “have lost nothing, except for casualties….” His successors wereeager to achieve better relations with the West, at least in the short term, and there seemed no better place to start than Korea. They pressed their new determination on the Chinese and North Koreans, both of whom were, by this time, more than willing to make a deal. Their combined casualties were appalling, probably more than 1.5 million, three times what the U.N. had suffered. The Communist side also feared that Eisenhower might authorize the use of atomic weapons. The possibility was discussed in Washington, and rejected, though the U.S. Air Force apparently did drop dummy atomic bombs over North Korea. The Soviets took our nuclear arsenal seriously. “They must be scared as hell,” Eisenhower once remarked about the new Soviet leaders.
That was the background of the armistice that was eventually agreed upon at Panmunjom. Did that armistice, as so many claimed at the time, mark the end of the first war that the U.S. lost? The following essay takes an entirely different view.
ROBERT COWLEY is the founding editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. He has edited three previous anthologies, No End Save Victory, about World War II; With My Face to the Enemy, about the Civil War; and, most recently, The Great War. He has also edited three volumes of the What If?™ series. Cowley lives in Connecticut and Rhode Island.
FIVE DECADES HAVE PASSED since July 23, 1953, when the armistice agreement that ended the Korean War was signed at Panmunjom. No wild celebration attended the event, only a hushed and sullen sourness. In the rain the night before, North Korean carpenters had erected a makeshift building for the ceremony. They had deliberately left only a single entrance at the north end, which meant that the United Nations delegation would have had to march a few symbolic yards through Communist territory. The commander of the U.N. forces, General Mark W. Clark—“Wayne” to his close associates—insisted on a second, southern entrance; it was hacked through at the last minute.
Promptly at ten A.M., the opposing delegations, two men on each side, entered the room and sat down at tables placed side by side. Two years, seventeen days, and 575 meetings had led up to this moment in the artificial settlement in no-man's-land. The U.N. signers, studiedly casual, wore open shirts; their North Korean opposites, full-dress uniforms buttoned to the neck. Nobody spoke. Documents were exchanged for signing. Then everyone stood up and, without a word, a glance, or a handshake, filed out their respective doors. The whole ceremony had taken exactly twelve minutes. “I cannot find it in me to exult in this hour,” Clark said later, forever bitter that he would be remembered as the first U.S. commander in his country's history to preside over an armistice without victory.
But the significance of Panmunjom had eluded Clark. Korea had been a new kind of war, a war that neither side could afford to lose—or to win. Victory, as Douglas MacArthur had learned to his sorrow, was too dangerous to risk. That went for the Communist side as well. In an effort to unify Korea, they had originally overplayed their hand—a hand that Mao Tse-tung, at Stalin's urging, once more overplayed when he sent in Chinese “volunteers” that first autumn. The war had to end close to where it had begun on June 25, 1950, on an irregular line that slanted through the 38th Parallel at Panmunjom. As if to provide a parenthetical symmetry, rain had fallen that first morning, too.
I should admit at the outset that I did not fight in the Korean War. I was a freshman in college the spring before it ended, and I managed to preserve my student status—barely—through a test administered all over the country one balmy Saturday morning in May 1953. Every male who received a grade of 77 or better would escape the draft as long as he remained in college; a postcard informed me that I had scored a 78. But unlike Vietnam a decade later, most of us were prepared to serve. I still have acquaintances, a little older than I, who experienced the terror of night patrols in the wide no-man's-land between hillside trench systems, or who flew as observers in Cessna L-19s, calling in targets. (They always flew with a metal plate under their seat cushion, to protect their private parts from ground fire.) One of my closest friends, a former infantryman in the 25th Division, will talk about everything except his wounding in 1952. To them, Korea is hardly a forgotten war.
Byron Hollinshead, with whom I worked for fifteen years, served as a marine. The problem, he says, is less that Korea is forgotten now than that it seemed to be forgotten at the time. “Today in Iraq when guys get killed, it's front-page news. We had big battles, and they made the second section.”
“Overlooked” would probably be a more precise word than “forgotten.” The Korean War does not deserve to be remembered merely as a cliché. Historians explain it away as a conflict lacking myths, as if wars should be ranked by their Olympian attractions. What about the left hook out of nowhere at Inchon—or the Stonewall Jackson–like surprise of the American Eighth Army by the Chinese in November 1950? Or the anabasis of the marines from the Chosin Reservoir, a fighting retreat worthy of Xenophon? Or the stand by the British and Belgians of the 29th Brigade the following April at the Imjin River? Weren't they epic enough?
You can tick off other features of Korea that are worth remembering. It was, to begin with, truly coalition warfare: Twenty-two nations participated in varying degrees in the U.N. “police action” (we could
use some of them in Iraq today). Japan, so recently our mortal enemy, experienced an economic renaissance, which owed much to the American need for an untouchable base of operations. President Harry S. Truman integrated our armed forces, a true milestone for the United States. There were notable firsts. The first war in which massive nuclear retaliation was brandished as an overt threat. The first jet war. The first war in which helicopters played a part. The first war whose outcome hinged on the fate of prisoners of war—remember the phrase “brain-washing”?—a dispute that delayed the armistice by fifteen months and cost the U.N. side an estimated fifty thousand casualties.
From a strictly military point of view, the Korean War was a tactical and operational draw. Clark was right in that sense. But in strategic terms, most of which were not evident at the time, it was ultimately a defeat for the U.S.S.R. and, to a lesser extent, for Communist China. Drawn battles often produce undrawn results. When the French and British fleets broke contact after the Battle of the Capes in 1781, neither victory nor defeat was discernible. But the lack of British initiative left Lord Cornwallis's army trapped at Yorktown, making American victory in the Revolutionary War inevitable. Gettysburg was at once a tie and a huge Confederate defeat. The Germans may have sunk more British ships than they lost at Jutland in 1916, but the High Seas Fleet never again emerged from its home bases.
So, too, had the Cold War stalemated by 1950. The wave of Communism had reached its high-water mark. After the success of the Marshall Plan, the failure of the Berlin blockade and the Greek civil war, and the creation of NATO and an independent West Germany, Stalin sought to turn the momentum of the Cold War once more in his favor. Gambling on the forced reunification of Korea before Japan resumed her place as a Pacific power, he had backed (albeit with misgivings) the invasion of South Korea by his North Korean puppet, Kim Il Sung. Truman's unexpected response not only saved South Korea and strengthened Japan but also blocked a planned Communist assault of Taiwan. The U.S. could then use the not so covert involvement of the U.S.S.R. in the Korean War as a pretext for excluding the Soviets from the peace settlement with Japan—and went on to forge a defensive alliance with its former enemy. (To this day, the Russians have still not signed a peace treaty with Japan; the disposition of four small islands in the Kuriles, taken by the Soviets in 1945, has hindered relations between the two countries for almost sixty years.)
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