The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  That did not mean everyone was really aboard. There was soon a mounting uneasiness in Washington, first among the civilians and then among the military as well, as MacArthur began to stretch his orders, and as the march northward was accompanied first by threats from the Chinese that they were going to enter the war in time, and then by the appearance of Chinese soldiers. People in Washington worried as well about MacArthur’s own physical and emotional energies to run a full-scale war like this. There were constant reports feeding back to Washington that he lacked the vigor for command, which would explain why he never spent much time in country (an essential requisite for a serious commander). Some officers in the Pentagon had heard from their contemporaries in the field how distanced he was from Korea itself. They worried as well about his mental processes, and they were bothered above all by the way he split his command and by the chaotic nature of the amphibious landing at Wonsan.

  There might be days when he looked wonderful, but others when he looked tired and seemed out of it. His staff, these reports said, was doing a lot of propping up to make him seem more vital than he was. In most photos he still looked like a significantly younger man, but sometimes another reality crept in, at moments when he could not control the atmosphere and the performance somehow faltered. Reginald Thompson, a British journalist, remembered seeing MacArthur at the ceremonies celebrating the liberation of Seoul, when he had been forced by protocol to take his hat off momentarily, and he had looked “curiously human, old and even pitiable without his hat.” Still, so far it had all worked. “Had Napoleon Bonaparte examined MacArthur’s career up to the eve of the Korean War,” wrote his sympathetic biographer Clayton James, “he undoubtedly would have concluded that he passed the first and foremost test of a commander: he was lucky.” After Inchon, that luck finally ran out.

  23

  IT WOULD BE a time of signals sent but not received. Warnings about the Chinese coming in were not picked up in part because no one really wanted to, in part because the people who might have understood what the Chinese were saying had been squeezed out of positions of influence, and in part because in one critical instance the Chinese picked the wrong messenger. The man the Chinese chose as their conduit to the West was K. M. Panikkar, the Indian ambassador to Beijing. Panikkar was an experienced diplomat and a considerable intellectual presence, but he was also unlike the kind of diplomat with which Washington was used to dealing. The Truman administration viewed him as unacceptably far to the left, his messages reflecting his political prejudices, not reality (at least as Washington preferred it to be with its particular set of prejudices). Panikkar was a serious writer, the author of several books, including Asia and Western Dominance, which had been praised by the noted British historian B. H. Liddell Hart. But he was something relatively new in the diplomatic world, a representative of a newly independent Asian country that had just gained that independence from its colonial master. This was the prism through which he saw developments in Asia, a prism quite different from that of his more conventional colleagues. Unlike Mao’s China, India was democratic, but it was non-white, and extremely sensitive to any hint of postcolonial intrusion from the West. Panikkar was not preoccupied first and foremost with the Cold War in the way diplomats from European countries were; instead, he cared about what he felt was the larger struggle taking place, between the colonizers and colonized, between the First and Third Worlds. To most traditional Western diplomats, the Cold War was the transcending historical issue of the era, the drive among non-white people to end colonialism a sideshow; to men like Panikkar, on the other hand, the great historical moment was the coming end of colonialism, and the Cold War was the sideshow. Panikkar saw Mao’s victory on the Chinese mainland as part of a larger global anticolonial revolt, a view radically different from that of Washington.

  Panikkar had arrived in China in April 1948 in time to witness the final months of Chiang’s regime and had been appalled by the corruption. Thanks to unchecked inflation, you needed a suitcase filled with Chinese dollars just to do ordinary shopping, he noted. He had a certain sympathy for Chiang, whom he saw as a man with a medieval mind, in his words “a great man born a century too late,” but little fondness for Madame Chiang, “a person conscious of her own superiority…[who] has also developed the deportment of a queen.” Though Chiang’s China was totally dependent on the United States for aid, Panikkar was amused by the attitude of “patronizing condescension” Chiang’s top officials displayed to the Americans. To the leaders of the Guomindang, “America was no more than a great barbarian for whose dollars and equipment she [China] had immediate need, but for whose culture she had no great admiration.”

  Panikkar was the very prototype of an Indian intellectual of his time, educated in India and at Oxford; he had originally been a journalist and in time became a serious historian. He was a close friend of Jawaharlal Nehru’s, India’s first prime minister, with powerful connections forged during the independence struggles. Neither he nor Nehru were that much at ease with Mao’s harsher vision. Mao saw Nehru as too compromised a figure to be a genuine revolutionary, and Nehru in turn was bothered by what he came to consider Mao’s callousness about life. He himself was not, Panikkar eventually wrote in his memoir, sympathetic to Communism, for he hated the lack of respect it gave the individual in society. But he felt he understood the forces driving the Chinese revolution, and he disliked the forces he saw trying to stop it. In late July 1950, when Panikkar first talked with Prime Minister Zhou Enlai about Korea, the prime minister assured him that China had no intention of entering the Korean War. But in late August, and again after Inchon, the tone in Beijing began to change, and a variety of Chinese officials began to offer Panikkar a series of increasingly ominous warnings. In their eyes, post-Inchon, the perceived threat from America was changing, so their position of disengagement was changing. Panikkar might not have been the messenger Washington would have chosen, but the world was changing, and as it changed, so did its messengers.

  Washington mistrusted Panikkar, and thought him a leftist. As early as September 23, a week after Inchon, Panikkar was told by Nieh Yenrong, the acting Chinese chief of staff, that China would not sit idly by and let the Americans come to their border. Did he know the implications of what he was saying? Panikkar had asked. “We all know what we are in for, but at all costs American aggression has to be stopped. The Americans can bomb us, they can destroy our industries, but they cannot defeat us on land,” Nieh had answered. With their military power, Panikkar suggested, the Americans could set China back half a century. “We have calculated all that,” Nieh answered. “They may even drop atomic bombs on us. What then? They may kill a few million people. Without sacrifice a nation’s independence cannot be upheld.” But the problem for the Americans, Nieh added, was that most Chinese people lived on farms. So, he said, “what can atomic bombs do there?” In this, Nieh was giving Panikkar a surprisingly accurate view of what Mao himself was then thinking. At the same time, talking with different Western military attachés in Beijing, Panikkar was hearing reports of trains loaded with soldiers heading north. His reporting, despite Western doubts, proved to be all too accurate.

  But the real warning came at midnight on October 2. Panikkar had been asleep for an hour and a half when he was awakened and told that the head of Asian affairs at the Chinese foreign ministry was downstairs. Downstairs he went, only to be summoned for a meeting with Zhou Enlai himself. He asked for ten minutes to get ready, wondering whether he was going to be arrested and deported. At 12:20 in the morning, an unusual hour to set off for so critical a meeting, Panikkar left his home. When he came face-to-face with the prime minister, he found Zhou very somber. The meeting was all business, and the message was brief and blunt. If the Americans crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, he told Panikkar, China would be forced to intervene. Panikkar asked Zhou if he already had news of such a crossing. The prime minister indicated that he had, although he did not know exactly where it had occurred. If the crossing ha
d been made by South Korean troops, Zhou said, that did not matter. It was only American troops he cared about. With that, the meeting was over. Panikkar got home at 12:30 A.M. and immediately filed a complete report on what had happened for his superiors in New Delhi, who in turn informed the rest of the diplomatic world. On October 8, he heard a radio report that the UN had authorized MacArthur to go north. That night Panikkar wrote in his diary: “So America has knowingly elected for war, with Britain following. It is indeed a tragic decision for the Americans and the British are well aware that a military settlement of the Korean issue will be resisted by the Chinese and that the armies now concentrated on the Yalu will intervene decisively in the fight. Probably that is what the Americans, at least some of them want. They probably feel that this is an opportunity to have a showdown with China, In any case, MacArthur’s dream has come true. I only hope it does not turn out to be a nightmare.”

  Edmund Clubb, an old China Hand and a very conservative man personally, was the director of the State Department’s Office of Chinese Affairs. He thought that Zhou’s statement to Panikkar, which came to him through the British, should be taken very seriously, that it was not a bluff. But there was a general feeling among his superiors that Clubb had been too alarmist in the past and there was no great need to listen to him at this moment. The administration did make one attempt to talk with the Chinese. It tried to arrange a low-key connection between Loy Henderson, the American ambassador to India, and the Chinese ambassador there, but the Chinese wanted no part of it and rejected the initiatives.

  Panikkar it would have to be. Certainly the British eventually took his warnings quite seriously, but in general Western diplomats were wary of him. The American ambassador to The Hague cabled Washington to pass on the low opinion the Dutch—another former colonial power now reluctantly in retreat from Indonesia, its colony—had for Panikkar. He had, the Dutch reported, strongly advised Indian Prime Minister Nehru to oppose the original UN declaration branding the North Koreans as the aggressors in the war. The CIA believed that Panikkar was an innocent instrument being used by the Chinese, but that the Chinese were not serious in their threats. Acheson was unimpressed. To him, Panikkar was a mouthpiece for Beijing and not a serious diplomat. Such warnings were the “mere vaporings of a panicky Panikkar.” To Acheson, the idea that the Chinese would actually want to fight the Americans and the United Nations seemed unlikely in the extreme. It would be “sheer madness” for them to enter the war when their real problem was that long border with the Soviets, and when they badly wanted to be installed in the Chinese seat at the United Nations Security Council. Few people of that era had a more powerful, logical mind than Dean Acheson, whose skills were those of a great lawyer. He was sure he knew what was good for the Chinese, and at that moment in their history, he was sure, a war with the Americans made no sense at all. Of his many skills, none was the ability to think like a Chinese revolutionary.

  In late September, after the In Min Gun started a panicky retreat north, the Chinese began to edge ever closer to intervention. What they would do next—entering the war, taking terrible casualties, but stalemating the Americans and the United Nations in the process—they did for their own reasons, not out of any great love for the North Koreans. Their respect for the Koreans and Kim at that moment was in fact quite marginal. They felt the Koreans had gotten their country too easily: the Chinese, after all, had won their great victory by fighting a numerically and technologically superior foe for decades. In addition, Mao and the others were still irritated by the arrogance and brashness of Kim Il Sung.

  The Chinese leaders had been appalled by Kim’s lack of response to their warnings about a possible amphibious landing at Inchon. Any Chinese commander who had disregarded such powerful, hard intelligence would have been relieved of command. In early August, as Chinese Army forces began to build up north of the Yalu, the Chinese sent one of their senior corps commanders, Deng Hua, to visit with his Korean military counterparts. Deng crossed the Yalu, got to the border town of Andong, and discovered that that was as far as he could go. The Koreans were not going to let him anywhere near the battle zone.

  The Chinese decided to send their troops to Korea because Mao believed it was good for the new China and necessary for the future of the revolution, both domestically and internationally. He also feared what a failure to intervene would mean—that his China, for all its rhetoric, was not that different from the old China, a powerless giant when facing what was in their eyes the armies of Western oppressors. Therefore, almost from the moment it became clear that Kim’s offensive was doomed, Mao had begun the planning that would end with the use of Chinese troops in Korea. In early July, a time when Kim’s armies were still gaining singular successes on the battlefield, Mao had nonetheless ordered the creation of what became the Northeast Border Defense Army, the NEBDA, to be positioned along the Korean border. It was to include more than three armies from the Fourth Field Army, which had some of China’s best troops. Eventually the force numbered thirty-six divisions, or roughly (with support units) some seven hundred thousand troops. Seven artillery divisions and some antiaircraft units were eventually attached.

  Mao had felt that there was a certain inevitability in China being pulled into the war, and he wanted to be as realistic as possible in gauging the price China would pay. On August 31, Zhou Enlai chaired a meeting on force levels where the senior people spoke not only of what they would need, but what it might cost in terms of potential casualties in the first year of a war with the Americans. The answer, they decided, was around 60,000 deaths and 140,000 wounded.

  The Chinese decisions in the weeks following Inchon were essentially those of one man, Mao Zedong. He was the classic example of the revolutionary as true believer. Starting out with so little, he had been unusually successful during those long years of the civil war—and most of his judgments, however bloody and difficult, had turned out right. He was sure he understood the ordinary Chinese—the peasants—better than anyone else. He believed in China’s right to be a great nation again; that the source of its strength was his revolution; and that the revolution had succeeded because it had evoked the purity of the Chinese peasantry and so turned historic political suffering into military strength. His men had been better soldiers than their well-armed Nationalist opponents because of their beliefs. As the principal architect of the new China, in his mind he now charged himself with keeping the revolution true to itself. That kind of belief in a single strand of history and in yourself as its principal figure—in effect serving as history’s man—is powerful stuff; it has both its strengths and its weaknesses.

  What Mao knew—about China’s peasants and their suffering, and the cruelty of the old order—he knew brilliantly; what he didn’t know, he didn’t know at all and often was unable to learn. That kind of success has the capacity to produce a terrible kind of megalomania. Epic revolutions probably demand someone with a supreme, invincible sense of self, a belief in the price that other men have to pay for the good of their vision; it was what allowed men like Mao and Stalin to rationalize great suffering for the good of the cause. But in such men there were no boundaries, no restraints, and what began as an all-consuming vision became almost inevitably a great nightmare as well; in time, monstrous crimes would be inflicted not on China’s foreign enemies, or even its domestic dissidents, but on its own loyal citizens, including many of the men who had served Mao so loyally in those years of civil war and then in Korea. But to understand Mao’s action at this critical juncture it is important to think of him always not just as the architect of a revolution but as its guardian as well, someone who believed that his enemies—of whom there were many, domestic and foreign—were always out to destroy his revolution and that he had to move against them before they moved against him.

  ON SEPTEMBER 7, a week before Inchon, Zhai Chengwen, the Chinese political counselor in Pyongyang, was recalled by the foreign ministry. There he was asked by Zhou: if the Chinese decided to send troops t
o Korea, what kind of difficulties would they encounter? Zhai answered that the problems would be primarily logistical in nature. Above all they would have to solve the problem of transportation from different parts of China to the Yalu bases, and then from these bases to the battlefields. When he left Beijing, Zhai believed that the leadership had already made up its mind to intervene. He was right, but it wasn’t really the leadership, it was Mao. Much of September was deeded over to two main tasks: getting troops to Manchuria and bringing the rest of the leadership over to Mao’s view on the need to enter the war. If there was opposition, it was primarily in the Army, and even there, because the Army was always subservient to the political needs of the party, it was somewhat muffled. Lin Biao was the senior field general, and the man most Chinese and foreigners alike expected to command Chinese forces if they entered the war. Indeed for a long time during the war, because of the intense secrecy the Chinese Communists adhered to, and because UN intelligence was seriously flawed, senior Americans believed that they were fighting against forces commanded by Lin. But Lin had his own reservations. The idea that his men would be exposed to the kind of firepower possessed by the Americans was very disturbing to him. At one point, Lin asked Zhai whether the North Koreans had the strength and the will to fight a prolonged guerrilla war against their enemies, a question that indicated his wariness of a frontal Chinese assault on American forces. His doubts were shared by others in the military and, more quietly, some in the politburo. How much more intense his opposition would have been had he known that the troops would not get promised air cover from the Soviets can only be imagined. Again and again in the three-month period from early July to late September, Mao and others spoke to Lin about commanding the Chinese troops who might fight in Korea. Each time the subject came up, Lin talked about the problems of his own personal health. That was interpreted by many to mean that he had no desire to be a part of an intervention about which he had grave reservations.