The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  5

  THE SOUTH KOREAN troops were not nearly as well trained or as well prepared. South Korea might well one day be a much stronger, far more dynamic society, but in those first few years, it was a less organized, more chaotic one, and the Army reflected the government. The officer ranks at the top were riddled with corruption. The ROK soldiers lacked motivation and were armed largely with leftover, worn-out World War II weapons. They had little in the way of artillery, almost no armored vehicles, and next to nothing in the way of fighter bombers, because Washington had feared that if it gave Syngman Rhee his weapons wish list, he would order his army to head north the next day. All this reflected the immense uneasiness that existed between Rhee—the most irascible, contentious, and independent of totally dependent clients—and the men who thought of themselves as his sponsors. Almost pathologically anti-Communist, Rhee wanted more than anything to go to war against the North (or, perhaps better still, to bait the richer, more powerful Americans into going to war for him). His goal was the mirror reverse of Kim’s: to create by any means a unified, independent, non-Communist Korea that he would rule. It was another version of the difficult and repetitive lessons the United States was to learn in Asia and had learned first with Chiang: with an Asian leader the Americans had helped install in this new postcolonial era, the more he was in all ways dependent on the United States, the more difficult the relationship was likely to be, because as he was dependent, he would ache to make moves that would prove his independence and would resent what might be considered control on the Americans’ part.

  As the hierarchical and authoritarian In Min Gun reflected the North Korea of 1950, so the ROKs reflected the troubled nation they represented—a subjugated, semifeudal society still struggling with the burdens of a colonial, feudal past, emerging awkwardly, slowly, and seemingly incompetently from that past, under a volatile, authoritarian leader who believed himself the ultimate democrat. The process of modernization in Korea would come, but it would come more slowly at first in the South than the North, where it came quickly but where it was a hollow, soulless kind of modernization, one that was inflicted on the population from the top down, a Sovietization of the nation’s political, economic, and security apparatus. In the South, it was an infinitely more difficult, more complicated process. In fact, it took the invasion to help South Korea find both form and purpose. Fifty years later, the South would be an admirable, industrially vibrant, ever more democratic society, while the North remained an arid, authoritarian, Sovietized state, surprisingly like the one that existed when the war started.

  In June 1950, what existed in the South was the most marginal kind of army fighting to defend the most marginal kind of country, a nation that did not yet really exist. The South Korean soldiers were mainly raw, illiterate kids pulled more often than not unwillingly off streets and farms and told they were soldiers. Most went into battle almost completely untrained. The level of desertion during that first year of the war was staggering—a battle would begin, and vast numbers of ROKs would simply disappear, presumably killed or missing in action, only to show up weeks or months later, usually without their weapons. The officer corps had some remarkably brave young men, but it also became, as Clay Blair noted, “a haven for too many venal opportunists who used their newly acquired power for personal gain. Among this element, theft, bribery, blackmail and kickbacks were commonplace.” As a modern army, the ROKs, like South Korea itself, had a long way to go on that June day.

  But in June 1950 no one responsible for the ROK Army was talking about what poor shape it was in. Quite the contrary. The level of self-deception about the quality of this army was surprisingly high among the American advisers and senior people in the Korean Military Advisory Group. (This advisory group had as its formal acronym KMAG, which soon, among American combat troops who fought alongside the ROKs, would be sardonically—and inevitably—retranslated as Kiss My Ass Good-bye.) The same self-deceptions would, a decade later, be repeated in shockingly similar ways in Vietnam as all too many senior American officers, men who knew better, publicly described the indigenous army as the best in Asia. In both Korea and Vietnam, Americans feared in all too many instances that if they told the truth—that they were advisers to a badly trained army whose fighting abilities were at best dubious—they would not get their own promotions.

  General William Lynn Roberts, who had finished his tour as the head of KMAG in the weeks just before the war started, was a rare exception, writing a 2,300-word letter to his superior, Lieutenant General Charles Bolté on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in March 1949, on exactly what dismal shape the ROKs were in. But because the United States was pulling its own combat units out of Korea for budgetary reasons, the public line would be very different: the Korean Army had turned the corner and its men were better equipped than the In Min Gun. That was how Bolté testified to a congressional committee in June 1949. Things had, he added, progressed to a point where American units could be safely withdrawn. Almost no one involved in training the ROKs believed that. In the weeks before he left for home in June 1950, Roberts himself bowed to the new Pentagon position and started a publicity campaign designed to sell the excellence of the South Korean forces. Most of his subordinates in the KMAG knew it was, sadly, not true. A KMAG report sent to the Pentagon on June 15, 1950, ten days before the invasion, pointed out that the ROKs existed on a bare subsistence level. Much of their gear and many of their weapons were useless. They could defend themselves against attack for at most fifteen days. “Korea is threatened with the same disaster that befell China,” the report concluded. How bad the situation was, hardly a secret throughout the Army because of back-channel information networks, caused Major General Frank Keating, ticketed by the Pentagon to replace General Roberts, to retire rather than take the assigned slot.

  General Roberts had been especially worried about the North Korean Air Force of more than one hundred Russian planes. But surprisingly, as a former tank commander, he had not worried nearly as much about their armored units, having concluded that tanks were not very important in a country so self-evidently ill-suited to tank warfare. He was right; it was poor tank country—and American superiority in tank production and tank warfare would not, later in the war, be as decisive as it might have been elsewhere. But in the immediate term he was wrong, for the North Korean tanks, much more than airpower, proved to be the decisive weapon in those first few weeks, especially against a tankless force armed with impotent, outmoded bazookas. For ordinary infantrymen, no matter how well trained, there was nothing more terrifying than fighting against tanks without tanks of your own or adequate antitank weapons. In that sense, it was not the tanks themselves but simply word that they were coming that spread panic among the South Korean troops in those early critical days. “For an experienced tanker like Roberts, who knew first hand the terror the German panzers had evoked among some tankless infantry in the [Battle of the] Bulge, his apparent indifference to the NKPA [North Korean People’s Army] armored forces was simply inexplicable,” Clay Blair wrote.

  The T-34 was no longer the most modern tank in the Russian arsenal, having been replaced by the Joseph Stalin III, but it was nonetheless an awesome piece of machinery, and the North Koreans had 150 of them. The T-34s had the capacity to dominate any battle in which they appeared in those first few weeks. Some ten years before, the T-34 had played a critical role in the defense of Moscow against the Nazis. General Heinz Guderian, who had commanded the German panzer divisions that had swept so easily across Poland in 1939, had called it “the best tank in the world.” When it had first appeared on the battlefields of Russia in 1942, the Russians finally began to gain parity with the Germans. It had a low-sloping silhouette, which often had the effect of deflecting enemy shells; it was durable, and it was fast, with a top speed of thirty-two miles per hour. The T-34 also had an unusually wide tread that kept it from getting stalled in mud and ice, and it possessed an unusually large fuel tank of one hundred gallons that allowed it to go up to
150 miles without refueling. It weighed thirty-two tons, had an 85mm cannon, two 7.62 mm machine guns, and very heavy armor plate. Opposing the T-34s, the South Koreans and their American advisers had only old 2.36-inch rocket launchers that had not been particularly good even in World War II. Brigadier General Jim Gavin, who had done a study after the war that cast doubt on their efficiency, thought the basic German rocket launcher infinitely better during that war. Now, five years later, it turned out that the 2.36 bazooka shells not only bounced off the skins of the North Korean tanks, but sometimes did not even explode. No wonder that, in those early days, the T-34 broke the back of any ROK resistance. By chance, the Americans had just finished work on a new, much improved 3.5-inch bazooka. The ammunition for it had gone into production on June 10, 1950. On July 12, the first of the new bazookas and instructors assigned to teach the troops how to use them arrived in Korea. When that happened, the immense advantage the In Min Gun enjoyed began to disappear.

  The In Min Gun had struck against the weakest point in the greater defense perimeter of a would-be superpower, one still undecided on what its real national security responsibilities were going to be. Not surprisingly, the ROKs managed to hold few positions against the furious Communist onslaught. It all fell apart very quickly: the In Min Gun took the South Korean capital, Seoul, some sixty miles south of the thirty-eighth parallel on June 27, just two days into their offensive, and the retreating South Korean troops barely had time to blow the bridges over the Han River to give themselves a moment’s breathing space.

  Part Three

  Washington Goes to War

  6

  WHEN WORD OF the North Korean invasion reached Washington, it was late Saturday evening and the American government, which did not then operate eighteen hours a day seven days a week, was scattered. The president, a man with a great fondness for train travel, had dedicated a new airport—Baltimore Friendship—on Saturday and then flown home to Independence, Missouri. Dean Acheson, the secretary of state, was on his farm in Maryland, and the other key figures in the government were doing the most banal of weekend things. Acheson had been notified of the North Korean assault by subordinates, and after checking carefully, he alerted Truman. (“Mr. President, I have very serious news. The North Koreans have invaded South Korea.”) Truman wanted to return to Washington immediately, but Acheson held him off—the information so far was scant. Besides, a late-night flight to Washington, with its special sense of urgency, could create a sense of alarm in other countries, Acheson believed. Still, Acheson emphasized that this one had the feel of the real thing.

  For the next thirty-six hours, news from Korea would reach Washington only in spurts. Perhaps the most important early signal of how serious things were came from John Foster Dulles and John Allison, who cabled Truman and Acheson on Sunday morning from Tokyo to say that if the South Koreans could not hold, then the United States should intervene. “To sit by while Korea is overrun by unprovoked armed attack would start a disastrous chain of events leading most probably to world war.” Coming as it did under Dulles’s name, the cable was also a reminder that there were always political considerations to these issues, not that Truman needed any political pressure on this one—his responses were instinctive, almost primal, and politics seemed not to matter to him at first.

  The moment Truman heard about the invasion, he began to prepare for his return to Washington. Still, he was careful not to vary his schedule. That Sunday morning he visited his brother Vivian’s farm as originally planned. Then, in mid-afternoon, he flew back for the first of a series of marathon meetings with his top military and civilian advisers. The first decision—to use American air and sea power in Korea to protect American dependents—would, as the North Koreans continued south at an accelerating pace and as South Korean forces crumbled, culminate in a fateful decision by week’s end to send in American ground troops.

  The Harry Truman who flew back to Washington on the afternoon of June 25, 1950, was a man of considerable confidence. He was no longer in Franklin Roosevelt’s shadow, and he had already tested himself before the American people in the grandest competition of them all, a presidential election, and triumphed in a great upset. He was increasingly confident of his ability to make decisions and he liked most of the men around him—George Catlett Marshall, Dean Acheson, Omar Bradley, and Averell Harriman, who had been running errands for him in Europe but was soon to be a troubleshooter with a wider mandate, a man of exceptional value. He was growing ever closer to Acheson, his secretary of state, and they were soon to forge a relationship virtually unique in modern political annals. He did not doubt that he was up to the job. There was no burden from the past, no inner voice that wondered what Franklin Roosevelt might have done. Harry Truman, whatever else, did not look back.

  In a way, the critical decisions on Korea had been made before his plane even landed. Almost all of his top advisers knew which way they were going to come down, as did Truman. To a man, the top people in the National Security Council regarded the North Korean crossing as a flagrant violation of the United Nations charter. One country had invaded another, and if the Communist leaders on the other side of the world thought it would be viewed in Washington the way the civil war in China had been, they were badly mistaken. Instead the reaction was purely generational among these men whose view of national security had been molded by World War II; the North Korean action stirred memories of another moment at the beginning of another war, when the democracies had permitted the crossing of a border and failed to act. Of the many miscalculations made by both sides during the Korean War, perhaps the most egregious on the Communist side was the misunderstanding of how the Western democracies, principally the United States, would respond to a North Korean invasion of the South, that it would be viewed through the prism of Munich. Truman’s thoughts while flying back to Washington were, as he recalled, of how the democracies had failed the last time to stop Mussolini in Ethiopia and the Japanese in Manchuria, and of how easily the French and British might have blocked Hitler’s moves into Austria and Czechoslovakia. In his mind, the Soviets had pushed—perhaps even ordered—the North Koreans to cross the parallel, and he believed that the only language the Russians understood was force. “We had to meet them on that basis,” he later wrote. It was not so much Korea they thought was important—but how America responded to a Communist provocation. America’s prestige had been instantly placed at stake when the invasion took place, and prestige, Acheson said, when he heard that the North Koreans had crossed the border, “is the shadow cast by power, which is of great deterrent importance.”

  Truman was already a hard-liner. The five years since the end of World War II had been difficult ones, as two formidable and excessively anxious nations had faced off, each uncomfortable in its new role as a great power, each in its own way essentially isolationist, each governed by an economic system that saw the other’s as its sworn enemy, each with an apocalyptic vision of the other as a relentless predator sworn to its destruction, both of them fearful and anxious in their new roles in a terrifying new atomic age. Each had its own anxieties—indeed, paranoia. A surprisingly cocky, almost ebullient Truman had partially mismeasured Stalin in their first meeting at Potsdam in Germany in late July 1945, after the Allied victory in Europe, and had underestimated his darker side. He had understood some of Stalin’s sense of political power (“Stalin is as near like Tom Pendergast as any man I know,” he had said right after the meeting, referring to the Kansas City political boss who had given him his start in politics) but had to be disabused of his ideas of being able to deal with Stalin. “And I liked the little son of a bitch,” he said later. But at Potsdam he had hoped a certain kind of Midwestern straightness, a kind of let’s-get-everyone’s-cards-on-the table attitude, could lead to some kind of acceptable and measured accommodation for the postwar period, perhaps even a modest if edgy continuation of the wartime relationship. Those first moves had not worked with Stalin, a man who never put any of his cards on the tabl
e, most certainly not with the president of the most powerful capitalist nation in the world. (Truman’s candor was, of course, not quite as great as he imagined; it was while he was at Potsdam that the first nuclear test took place successfully, something he did not deign to mention, but about which Stalin, because of Soviet spies, knew a great deal.)