The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  But those early successes were the rare ones, and they were always imposed downward from the top; the North was a land without debate and discussion, or finally, choice. It was a place where you learned how to salute and to obey; a world without any mechanism for change. As a society, North Korea was like a living organism that simply could not breathe and was always on a respirator; as it could not breathe, it could not grow. For societies to grow, they have to be able to develop both in the right way and sometimes in the wrong way, for there is no perfect journey—you learn as much from your mistakes as from your successes. But in the North there was no criticism, no wrong step; every step, because it had been taken by Kim Il Sung, was always the right one. As such the North soon became a model for a new kind of highly personalized, airless, Asian totalitarianism, a land without oxygen, even more totalitarian than Mao’s China because China was so large that it was harder to control. In time, North Korea became one of the most xenophobic places in the world. As South Korea often seemed to bumble—veering back and forth from totalitarianism to what sometimes seemed like tiny increments of democracy, North Korea never stumbled—and that was its great sin. It remained frozen in a terrible monomania, a land with only one man whose thoughts could be acted on.

  No political rivals were allowed to develop. Kim was the equal of Stalin in the art of purging his rivals. The only word that mattered was that of Kim Il Sung, and he was always right, which meant any alternative view of politics, economics, and agriculture was wrong. In the 1980s and 1990s, as both Russia and China began in different ways and in different degrees to adjust to moderating forces, Pyongyang grew ever more distant from them, unable to change and unable to adjust—because any change might mean a fall from power for Kim. As other Communist societies, once exceedingly fraternal to North Korea, began to change and were ventilated by new forces, North Korea if anything became more didactic and more rigid, more a prisoner of one-man rule than ever; the more other Communist nations changed, the more distrusting and self-isolating the North became, and the more convinced its leader was that he was alone and could trust no one.

  It was as if he alone had fought every battle, won every victory in the struggle for North Korea’s independence. The Chinese were furious when they visited the museum dedicated to the Korean War in Pyongyang and found what a tiny role they had played in saving their sister state; they were barely worthy of mention. At the same time, as a means of proving to his own population (and quite possibly himself ) that his way was right and that the citizens of North Korea, despite famine and constant police procedures and an abysmal standard of living, were blessed in their good fortune, the cult of personality grew more profound, leading him past his former tutors, Stalin and Mao. A giant sixty-six-foot bronze statue of him stood in the center of the ninety-two-room Museum of the Revolution. The city also had an Arch of Triumph, even grander than the one in Paris; it celebrated Kim’s return from Japan in 1945. It was a city—and a country—literally never absented by a likeness of him.

  He was always referred to as the Great Leader. He had five great palaces, which no one else dared live in or use. All traffic stopped when he drove down one of Pyongyang’s thoroughfares. His photo, and, in time, lest there be any mistake about the succession, that of his son, hung everywhere. Ordinary people somehow managed in their everyday dress to carry a photo of him on their jackets or tunics or dresses. By the later 1980s, according to Don Oberdorfer, who wrote about the two Koreas, there were at least thirty-four thousand monuments to Kim Il Sung in the North, not including park benches where he had once however briefly sat and which were thereafter covered with glass. Once asked by a Soviet official about what appeared to be the cult of personality in his nation, he had answered that it was simply part of the history of the land: “You don’t know our country. Our country is used to paying respect to elders—like China and Japan, we live by Confucian culture.”

  His people starved, and the production from his factories was considered pathetic. He was from the start something of an international outlaw, trying to arrange the assassination of rivals in Seoul and kidnapping people from the South he felt could be helpful to his state. He seemed, as he aged, to have two main dreams, first to develop an atomic weapon of his own, and second, to name his son, Kim Jong Il, as his successor. Nothing reflected the growing change between his country and that of the South more than the ability to look at photos taken from above the two Koreas at night by satellite—the land below the thirty-eighth parallel alive with lights and commerce of all kinds, the land above the parallel blacked out, a kind of self-inflicted wasteland.

  Kim had in the end created a nation in his own image, one without vitality and hope, taking an existing totalitarian system and, by dint of adding his skills and fears, strangling it. North Korea became more isolated all the time, outside the reach of even its former allies like China and Russia, and still hoping to create an atomic weapon so that then at least it could be a viable outlaw state.

  OF THE SUCCESSES that America was responsible for in the post–World War II/Cold War era, what happened in South Korea was probably the most impressive and dramatic—ranking even above the success of the Marshall Plan, which had delivered financial aid, materiel, and technical assistance to European societies that had in the past been fully developed powerful societies but had been badly damaged physically by the war. Korea, by contrast, had little in the way of a democratic past and little in the way of a middle-class life or an industrial base. What was created there after the war was politically, economically, and in many ways socially strikingly new. Powerful, more advanced neighbors had systematically colonized and exploited Korea’s people. Their talents had long been dormant. Certainly there had been foreign witnesses in the past, most of them missionaries, who had understood the vast potential of the Korean people, their hunger for a better life, their innate talents, their surpassing work ethic—right up there with that of the Japanese—their Confucian respect for education, and the way they had maximized what limited opportunities were available to them. But the peninsula’s history—that is, its geography—had too often been bleak. There had always been a more powerful regional player, a nation on a power ascent of its own, eager to dominate Korea and to suppress its people. In the period immediately after World War II, the South had appeared to be headed for more of the same, with the Americans now a player, poorly prepared for an old colonial game, bumbling and fumbling, curiously ignorant of modern Korean history, quick to get many things wrong and to underestimate the possibilities of the future for Korea. The Americans hardly seemed an improvement on great powers who had been there in the past, other than that they seemed to know less about Korea’s history than so many of their predecessors and existed at a far greater geographical distance, which might have been a plus. They helped impose on the South Syngman Rhee, a genuine patriot, but a man whose idea of a democratic society was one where he and his closest allies could do what they wanted, and everyone else should be watched.

  But whatever else, the Americans were willing (because of their broad anti-Communism) to have their sons die on Korean soil, and they were not there as conquerors or, in the classic sense, imperialists. In time, as the Cold War became less intense, they were willing to adjust to some of the more democratic impulses taking place in the society, impulses often imported back from the United States by Koreans who had gone to America to study and had been affected by the freedoms they discovered there; many who had gone to study engineering had learned about both engineering and democracy.

  So it was under the American aegis in the midst of the Cold War, which had so immediately followed a hot war, that South Korea was allowed to modernize, first militarily and then technologically and industrially, but not politically; that was not part of the original package. But then, in some thirty years, in retrospect an amazingly quick turnaround, there was a startling democratization of the society, a surprising by-product of the other aspects of modernization. What happened in South Korea was
an odd mix of revolution with evolution, all taking place at an unusual rate of speed. It had begun with the need, self-evident during the Korean War, for a better South Korean Army, and that had to begin with better, more professional Korean officers. Too many of the existing ones at the start of the war were hacks who held their positions out of loyalty and willingness to play their part in the massive national corruption. In 1952, under pressure from the Americans, a new military academy was inaugurated, based to an uncommon degree on West Point. Many of the early faculty members were American officers. The curriculum, like the one at West Point, was tilted heavily toward engineering. Many of the country’s most talented young students were sent there—and it became an instant source of meritocratic talent, a place where a generation of talented young Koreans could get a badly needed education and prove their worth, and break through some of the social restraints of the past.

  It was an early harbinger of a new, potentially more modern society. It was probably the first step in creating what became in effect a new class in Korea, that of modern, purposeful, increasingly well-educated young men who wanted to bring a new definition of modernity to their country. The consequences of the military school and its then critical role in the nation were greater than any of its founders realized they might be: in effect the more the Army—and the country—modernized technologically and economically, the more the old ways were going to be seen as archaic and corrupt, and the less control that Rhee and the men who eventually replaced him had over the country. And in some ways the association of these students with their American teachers was fateful. The American officers represented something new. Their body movement and language reflected two quite contradictory things—respect for the military hierarchy and yet a high degree of personal freedom within that same hierarchy.

  It was the first critical step in the modernization of an educational, social, and then economic, and finally political, order. As the military system was modernized, so too were other colleges and universities; as the nation gained in stature and talent and confidence, it began to want to be a player economically on the international scene, and that same engineering talent was put at play there, a kind of state-guided, state-propelled capitalism. In some ways it was not unlike a smaller Japan, although the victories in Korea were far greater, because there had been an earlier precedent for some of Japan’s economic successes, but little for those of Korea.

  What happened in South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s was a fascinating human and societal story, a great lesson in the uses of adversity. The people who ran the country, Rhee and the men around him, did so for some thirty years in a narrow and dictatorial manner, but even as they did and as they suppressed a series of student protests, the currents within the country for a better life were becoming more powerful. Economic success gradually begat an increasing social optimism and confidence, and in time a growing restlessness on the part of the population, manifest first among its students. That change was taking place in home after home, even as Rhee and the government thought they could do business as usual and that all the power in the society existed at the top. It was a case of a nation, surely not the first and surely not the last, changing in its expectations and aspirations without the hierarchy at the top understanding the new forces. When Rhee finally fell from power in April 1960, the chief of staff of the ROK Army said, “Personally, I respect Dr. Rhee. But history has turned him down, has scorned him and lost its trust in him. I, who saw the march of events, am sick inside about it.”

  In the background to all of this there was the leavening influence of the United States; in those early years the American government at the highest level, still deeply engaged in the Cold War, might have constantly tilted toward an authoritarian definition of Korean leadership, but there were other influences of America as well; many of the young Koreans had studied in the United States and discovered that you could be a loyal citizen and a free person at the same time, that loyalty to the state often had a built-in complexity to it that allowed you to disagree with the government’s actions while still loving your country. So it was that South Korea, in small steps that few people understood at the time, and that no one planned or expected, stumbling toward a freer society, began the process in the late 1970s of serious democratization. More young Koreans were feeling more confident about their own abilities and lives and wanted greater increments of freedom to go with the greater increments of prosperity. The kind of talent and ambition that some of the early missionaries had spotted in another century—the capacity for hard work, the immense discipline, the desire for more education—were manifesting themselves on a national scale, and this had its own dynamic. Once the people of the South sensed the possibility of a better life, it was hard to slow them down.

  The government tried for a time to suppress those forces, but it was overtaken by the very successes it had authored—the more successful the economy, the more confident ordinary Korean citizens felt about themselves, and the more they wanted to share, both economically and politically, in the fruits of their success. The government faced a crisis that it never really understood—in a sense a vast nationwide protest driven by rising expectations. At first the pressure for political liberalization came primarily from the universities and the students, but in time the labor unions joined up and ordinary citizens of the middle class followed them. “Korea by 1987 had irrevocably changed,” said Gaston Sigur, who was assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific in the late 1980s. “The middle class had become a power. And it could no longer be disregarded. The government wasn’t dealing with a handful of left-wing students. They may have been out in front, but it was plain that you had strong middle class support for the demonstrations.” In a stunningly short time, South Korea had morphed itself into a dynamic, highly productive, extremely successful democracy. “I cannot think of another country, at least in recent history, that went so swiftly from an authoritarian system to a democracy on its own,” a member of the party of Roh Tae Woo, a truly democratically elected president of Korea, once told Frank Gibney. In the South the great success had come because the top of the political hierarchy had been forced, no matter how reluctantly, to pay attention to the needs and aspirations of the bottom and middle of the society.

  FOR THE AMERICANS and others who had fought there, who had more often than not felt the lack of recognition in their own country, and who had not particularly liked the country when they were there, the success of South Korea as a nation brought a sense of belated validation to their sacrifice, and the sacrifice of others who had not come home, and granted them a legitimacy and honor that they had not always felt.

  So many of them had for so long kept it inside themselves. No one wanted to hear about the war when they had first come home, and so they never talked about it, not to their families or to their oldest friends. Or when they did, no one understood—or, worse, wanted to understand. Their children more often than not would grow up knowing only that their fathers had served in the war, but almost nothing else—which units they had been with and what battles they had fought in. They would complain about their fathers, that they were never willing to talk about the war.

  It was all bottled up. What they had done and why they had done it were still important to them—they were proud of having gone, and proud also of how well they had done under dreadful conditions. They mourned those who had not come back, but they shared it only with one another. More than half a century later, this was still the defining experience in so many of their lives, and a number of them had become, in their own way, amateur historians. Late in life they wrote their own memoirs, sometimes privately published or simply Xeroxed and stapled together, done often somewhat belatedly at the urging of their children and grandchildren. A surprising number of them had, in effect, their own history rooms, with small libraries devoted to the Korean War, and with large maps of the country showing selected battle areas pinned to the walls. But the rooms, like so many of the experiences and the mem
ories, were effectively closed off to outsiders. No one, save the others who had gone, had offered the proper respect for what they had done and why they did it back when it had mattered. It was as if a critical part of the experience, the validity of it as judged and valued by others, had been stolen from them.

  They shared, then, this one great bond—that they could talk to one another and that those who had been there would always understand. They kept in touch by phone and letter, and then late in life by the magic of the Internet, a wonderful means as well of locating old buddies who had been lost in the shuffle of time. Their alumni associations were important, and they took their division and regimental newsletters seriously, as well as their annual conventions. Friendships were sustained, and sometimes new ones flowered between men who had been in adjoining units but had not known each other in Korea itself. At the reunions they gathered in small groups, often men who had been at a particular battle, summoning their pasts through the haze of half a century of memories. In the words of Dick Raybould, an artillery forward observer in the Ninth Regiment of the Second Division, “You go to the reunions and you find yourself trying to remember what you’ve spent the last fifty years trying to forget.”

  Gradually some of them began to go back to visit South Korea. At first it was something of a trickle, and then more of them went and came back and talked about it, and they went on organized tours with other veterans. They visited places where they had fought during the Naktong battles, and certain special battlefields, like Chipyongni. They did not visit the area around and above Kunuri and The Gauntlet, where the terrible defeat had first been inflicted on them, because that was the other side of the parallel and could not be visited. But they, many of whom had hated the country when they first served there, were impressed, first by the success of the country itself, its remarkable modernization, but also by the sense of gratitude that they felt on the part of the local people—far greater than anything bestowed on them in their native land. And they took pride in one additional thing: that if it had not been a victory in the classic sense, in some way what they had done had worked, because it was the crossing of an existing border in the Cold War; and because they had made their stand, it had not happened again.