Thread: Korea: Reluctant Dragons and Red Conspiracies

Once the war began, American leaders anxiously pondered every possibility, from the potential for Chinese intervention to the chance of reaching into North Korea and toppling Kim's government. As early as July 7, 1950, only two days after American troops first made contact with the onrushing North Korean army, MacArthur informed his military superiors that his forces, properly supported by reinforcements, might defeat the invaders. But he warned that intervention by either the Chinese or the Soviets would create a wholly different situation. A few days later, the U.N. commander declared that he could prevent Chinese intervention by mounting operations in North Korea. His troops would have to occupy all of the Korean Peninsula but would not have to move into Manchuria. On July 17, President Truman requested that the National Security Council consider policy choices once the North Koreans had been driven back north of the thirty-eighth parallel, the pre-war North-South border.

On September 11, four days before MacArthur's landing at Inchon, the president approved an NSC-recommended policy concerning operations in North Korea. Presidential approval would have to be obtained for troops to cross the thirty-eighth parallel, but no such move would be made in the event of a major Soviet or Chinese intervention. MacArthur's troops were forbidden to cross the border into Chinese or Soviet territory but might go up to the border. The ultimate policy objective was aimed at the unification of Korea through U.N.-supervised elections.

Strangely, there is no indication that MacArthur was ever informed of Truman's decision to unify Korea until September 27, twelve days after the landing at Inchon. As a result, U.S. forces were unprepared to proceed into North Korea. The First Marine Division and Seventh U.S. Army Division had not been charged with extending their lines from Seoul eastward so as to cut off North Korean forces fleeing South Korea. The senior field commander, Lt. Gen. Walton Walker, stated on September 29 that his Eighth Army was planning to regroup at the thirty-eighth parallel, presumably to await further orders. Meanwhile, Walker's best pursuit force, Colonel William C. Westmoreland's 187th Airborne Infantry Regiment, had been assigned the mundane task of mopping up stranded North Korean troops throughout the Kimpo Peninsula.

When Washington finally ordered MacArthur north, his headquarters stitched together a hasty, complex, and logistically questionable plan in twenty-four hours. The scheme had the Marines and the Seventh Division backing out of the Seoul-Inchon area and mounting an amphibious operation into the northeastern part of the peninsula. Eighth Army, at the same time, was to fight its way north from the Pusan Perimeter. Paratroopers were hurriedly collected and staged for an airdrop above the North Korean capital in western North Korea. All this took time--too much time. By not allowing MacArthur an opportunity to prepare for the conquest of North Korea, the Truman administration forced hasty planning in late September and early October in order to prepare for the coming winter and delayed the U.N. northward advance by about seven days.

Despite a number of warnings, additional American lives were lost when the U.S. intelligence system failed again in October 1950. Crossing the thirty-eighth parallel and attacking north, U.S. forces and their civilian and military leaders in Korea, Tokyo, and Washington were acting on the basis of a flawed prediction by the CIA that the Chinese would not attack. This prediction stood unchanged from the time U.S. troops crossed the thirty-eighth parallel on October 9 until the first solid clash between U.N. and Chinese forces in North Korea on October 25. The CIA forecast was that Chinese intervention in the war "was not probable in 1950." Rarely have American servicemen and women been so tragically ill-served by their government. National-level intelligence was dangerously inadequate, and the coordination between policy makers, military strategists, and commanders was appallingly shoddy.

Of all the historical interpretations of the Korean War, however, few are as wrong-headed as the so-called "Check and Warning" notion. This is the favorite of those who insist that the United States provoked China, the Reluctant Dragon, into defending its borders, and that Mao moved troops across the Yalu River in late October 1950 in order to check U.N. forces and then withdraw.

The faulty assumption here is that Beijing's considerate, responsible action would give Washington notice that a U.S. threat to China's soil would not be tolerated. A subsequent American reaction, according to the Reluctant Dragon theorists, would have been to back off, to allow China to control a reasonable buffer zone south of the Yalu River, and thereby to avert war between the two powers.
Documents released by the Chinese government in 1997 disprove the Check and Warning thesis. On October 2, 1950, twelve days prior to Chinese troops moving into North Korea, Mao sent Stalin a message alerting the Soviet leader that China was jumping into the war to drive the Americans out of Korea and assist the expansion of communism. Beginning on October 14, the Chinese put 180,000 troops across the Yalu.
General Peng Dehuai, commander of China's forces in Korea, believed that due to Communist guerrilla activity, advancing U.N. forces would be kept to only about three U.S. and three Republic of Korea (ROK) divisions. He estimated the size of each American division to be twelve thousand troops, and that of each ROK division to be six thousand soldiers. Therefore, his 180,000 troops would be fighting about fifty-four thousand U.N. troops--a better than a three-to-one advantage. On October 21, 23, and again on October 25, Mao ordered Peng to surround ROK units in order to attract American forces farther northward where they could be defeated.

Within three days, Mao's orders had been obeyed. Three ROK regiments were all but destroyed, and one U.S. regiment, the Eighth Cavalry, had been roughly handled. But the Chinese, often in the open and exposed to U.S. firepower, had suffered as well. Peng reported to Mao on November 4 that he had been forced to call off his attacks and pull back. The general said that U.N. forces had retreated in time to avoid most of his planned traps. He also stated that his troops had become very fearful of U.S. air attacks. He described his soldiers as ill-supplied, cold, fatigued, and in need of reorganization before resuming the offensive.

Documents recently released also throw light on the November Lull episode, a lull in the fighting that occurred throughout the peninsula. Reluctant Dragon historians later interpreted this pause as an unstated Chinese offer to America of a truce in exchange for a protected Communist sanctuary in the northern reaches of North Korea. We now know that the mysterious November Lull was nothing more than a case of exhausted, cold, hungry, and battered Chinese troops in need of rest, resupply, and reorganization before resuming their efforts to annihilate U.N. forces and push the Americans out of Korea.

Historians writing from the 1960s to '80s, however, had not been the first to speculate on the reason for the lull. By November 9, 1950, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) were considering the mystery and concluded there were three possible reasons for the Chinese behavior. The first was that China was merely protecting its territory by establishing a buffer zone in the northern reaches of North Korea (the Reluctant Dragon theory). Second, they thought the type of action taken might merely signal a tactic: The Chinese intended to drain American military strength without risking much of their own. Finally, they considered the possibility that China was bent on driving U.N. forces from Korea and was merely regrouping. The Chiefs, however, did not believe the latter theory was credible.

Obviously alarmed about the late October--early November clash between Chinese and American troops, and perhaps influenced by the JCS's first choice of possibilities, the president took action. On November 16, Truman publicly reassured the Chinese Communist government that the U.N. command would not violate China's territory: "We have never at any time entertained any intention to carry hostilities into China." Thus, America's commander in chief and his top uniformed advisers might be described as charter members of the Reluctant Dragon school of thought.

Learning that the U.N. was going to resume its offensive before his troops were fully rested, and spurred on by Mao's repeated urgings to defeat MacArthur's forces, Peng withdrew his forces farther north in mid-November to set a trap. He called a meeting with his commanders and chided them for their recent performance, criticized them for failing to infiltrate U.S. and South Korean positions, and scolded them for relying on costly frontal attacks. His exhortations paid off. MacArthur's Thanksgiving offensive drove deep toward the Yalu. Some advance U.N. elements, who had been moved too rapidly, became separated from supporting units and were subjected to assaults by waves of Chinese attackers streaming down from snow-covered hills. The U.N. command was battered, and MacArthur's troops began rapidly withdrawing from a bitterly cold North Korea.

On December 4, Mao urged Peng to pursue. The commander of Chinese forces in Korea complied, but informed Mao that while the South Korean troops were running south too quickly to catch, the Americans were proving more difficult to handle. He said U.S. forces were good at fighting, which was why more Americans were killed than captured. On the same day, Peng was instructed to recapture Seoul and destroy the ROK army, an essential step in convincing the Americans to leave the Korean Peninsula. There is no known communication between Mao and Peng about the establishment of a buffer zone in North Korea.

Some historians, while belonging to either the Reluctant Dragon or to the Red Conspiracy camp, have also taken the position that Mao and his generals practiced the revolutionary warfare doctrine in Korea that they had developed and written about during the Chinese Civil War. These interpreters, advocates of the so-called "Inscrutable Doctrine" notion, tout this military theory as a well-designed antidote to the industrialized world's use of mechanized warfare. Usually, historians of this school have portrayed MacArthur and his lieutenants as helplessly incapable of discerning what they were fighting against. One popular history of the war has it that the November Lull easily could have been foreseen if only U.S. military leaders had read Mao's On Protracted War, a 1930s-era book that, among other techniques, encouraged drawing in and then destroying an opponent: "enemy advances, we retreat....enemy tires, we attack." These analysts usually cite protracted warfare, the deliberate selection of a strategy of exhaustion, as Mao's choice for the overall prosecution of the war.

The new scholarship, however, has undercut this theory as well. As Mao's instructions to General Peng in the first two months of China's intervention indicate, the Chinese leader insisted on a strategy of annihilation, not exhaustion. We now know China only accepted protracted warfare much later--and then only reluctantly.

Mao's orders to quickly destroy the U.N. forces continued well into 1951. On December 13, 1950, about a week after he had instructed Peng to destroy the South Korean army, he urged his commander to push his troops across the thirty-eighth parallel to allow no time for the retreating U.N. forces to reorganize. On December 31, the Chinese launched a major offensive in temperatures that reached twenty degrees below zero. General Matthew B. Ridgway, now commanding the U.N. forces, directed the abandonment of Seoul and the second withdrawal south of the city. His forces escaped encirclement and drew the Chinese farther away from their supply bases. When Ridgway's forces struck back on January 27, 1951, the Chinese were taken by surprise. They sustained heavy casualties and pulled back toward the thirty-eighth parallel. Peng radioed Mao suggesting a cease-fire, but the Chinese leader dismissed his subordinate's plea and ordered another offensive aimed at annihilating twenty to thirty thousand American and ROK troops. The offensive failed, and Ridgway resumed his steady march northward. In March 1951, rushing reinforcements to Peng, Mao stated that it was essential to avoid a stalemate; thus, the new troops had to be used in an offensive to recover lost ground. The Chinese general was instructed to destroy ten thousand American troops.

The planned Chinese offensive came in April. To Beijing's surprise, Ridgway's forces stood their ground. In May, the U.N. staged another surprise offensive, killing or capturing more than sixteen thousand Communist troops. Since crossing the thirty-eighth parallel in December 1950, Peng's forces had staged five offensive campaigns, none of which achieved the desired results.

Mao now abandoned his strategy of annihilation, dramatically scaling down campaign objectives on May 26, 1951. He acknowledged that past efforts had not only failed to destroy a U.S. division, Chinese forces had even failed to eliminate any known American regiment. He remarked that American units exhibited confidence. The new battle aims, he told Peng, would be to destroy one or two battalion-size U.S., British, or Turkish units. He said that Chinese units would have to be rotated in and out of the front so as to always maintain numerical superiority at any point. Mao then said that Peng's soldiers would have to be galvanized for a protracted and arduous war. General Peng Dehuai called his commanders together for a three-day conference (June 25-27, 1951) during which he told them that there should be no more expectations of a quick victory. The object now was to wear the enemy down. The new Chinese strategy was clearly not Mao's first choice.

Despite the new revelations coming from Moscow and Beijing, the flawed Reluctant Dragon version of the Korean War will likely persist for some time. The third wave histories that began appearing in the 1990s has been published in small runs by university presses or in academic journals. Mass-market, popular histories have yet to incorporate the more reliable information. This is unfortunate in view of the great impact this conflict had on the subsequent conduct of the Cold War and on the lives of hundreds of millions of people throughout the world.

The historians of the 1950s were right. There was a Red Conspiracy to invade and conquer South Korea. This war was a product of planning and coordination between three Communist leaders--Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-tung and Kim Il Sung--during 1949-50. China, with responsibilities to further world revolution in Asia, was involved from the beginning. Mao provided Kim with almost one-third of the initial invasion forces. Mao's actions were not driven by the need for breathing space between China's border and General MacArthur's troops. The Check and Warning notion is wrong. Instead his actions sprang from the goal he announced to Stalin: Eliminate the American presence on the Korean Peninsula.
The November Lull was no signal. It was no assertion of China's right to a buffer zone in North Korea. The lull was an essential pause in fighting to allow General Peng Dehuai to rearm, rest, and reorganize his troops after their first brutal and bloody exposure to American firepower. Those still adhering to the Reluctant Dragon thesis are mistaken.

The Inscrutable Doctrine thesis is also wrong. From the very start, Mao urged his subordinates to use a strategy of annihilation, the doctrine furthest removed from protracted warfare. He only accepted a prolonged war when his own strategy failed in five costly offensives. Protracted war, as it was portrayed in Mao's book, depended on extensive guerrilla operations in the enemy rear. While there were guerrilla actions in South Korea, they were put down by effective ROK and U.S. counterguerrilla operations. During the Korean War, Chinese operations initially resembled the conventional maneuvers of World War II. Later, Peng's forces fought as if they were on a World War I battlefield.

Until the Vietnam War, the conflict in Korea was many times called the only war the U.S. ever lost. But a comparison of conditions before the war with those after it clearly points to the Communists as the losers. The Soviet, North Korean, and Chinese leaders had badly miscalculated. Before China's attempt to seize South Korea, the United States had lost its nuclear monopoly and headed a smaller and much weaker military alliance than the one it opposed.

After the Korean War, America expanded its network of alliances. Within five years the United States had concluded mutual defense treaties with more than thirty nations. The Eisenhower administration established an effective national security structure that coordinated foreign policy with military plans and preparations. Of utmost significance, the United States rearmed West Germany, reawakening Moscow's darkest fears. If Stalin supported the invasion of South Korea in order to drain Western strength in Europe, he failed beyond any measure. For more than three decades thereafter, the Soviet Union was surrounded by nations dedicated to containing communism. Moscow had been far better off before the Korean War.

It was the same in Asia. Defying most of the Communist leadership's estimates, the United States had entered the war almost immediately after Kim Il Sung launched the invasion. Spoiling the North Korean leader's plans, MacArthur used air transport to put enough of the U.S. Twenty-fourth Infantry Division into Korea to fatally delay Kim's planned conquest. China's support of the war was as ill-rewarded as Stalin's aid. Beijing awoke one morning to discover the U.S. Seventh Fleet standing between itself and its long cherished goal: the recovery of Taiwan. Steadily, the Communist Chinese dream of taking control of this great prize faded away as the American-supported Nationalist Chinese armed forces grew in strength. And, in the end, a devastated North Korea not only failed in its attempted conquest, it ended the war with less of its own soil than it had gained from the South.
Most of all, the war initiated the West's Cold War policies that carried the seeds of communism's demise. The first few weeks of this conflict proved beyond a doubt that the United States armed forces were in desperate need of strengthening. These grim days and China's subsequent entry into the war also demonstrated to America's leaders that they could not trust the new U.S. national intelligence organization, the CIA, for an adequate warning of war.

Before the conflict was over and for many years later, U.S. officials believed they were facing a potentially well-coordinated and enormous threat, one whose actions could not be predicted. These beliefs resulted in a quadrupling of America's defense budget in only three years. And, for the next thirty-five years, the United States remained armed to the teeth. This unprecedented phenomenon--an enormous and ever-improving peacetime American armed force--drove the Soviet Union, the linchpin of world communism, into an arms race it could not win. It was a race that ended in Moscow's bankruptcy and the triumph of the West.

How about a third alternative of Stalin conspiring to set PRC and US into a collision course, while he withdraw his promised full-support from the Chinese .... Stalin deeply feared US nuclear arsenal, while Mao called USA as a papertiger, i never believed any of these official stories that try to glorify the Korean War like the clash of titans. Korean war was the rhineland of Stalin, where he would test Western resolve, only to shy away if US committed itself, while grooming Mao to support North. Even after Inchon, Stalin even called it quites by telling Kim Sung Il to setup a government-in-exile in Manchuria.