Chinese intentions seemed less predictable. While reports that Peking was moving troops to the Manchurian border could be read as preparation for saving North Korea’s Communist government, other evidence indicated that the Chinese were not planning a major effort and might only follow a policy of “indirect intervention” or limited backing for Kim’s forces. At least, that was what diplomats in China were reporting. By the beginning of October, however, the Chinese began issuing warnings that if American forces entered North Korea, they would be compelled to join the fighting. Reports now reached Washington of Chinese mechanized units already moving across the Yalu into Korea.
Between October 2 and 18, the Chinese debated the advantages and disadvantages of entering the war. At the same time they pressed Stalin, who was urging them to fight in defense of their national security and the Communist world revolution, to promise supplies and Soviet air support if they became a belligerent. On October 4 and 9, as they considered their options, the Chinese issued additional threats if MacArthur’s American troops crossed the thirty-eighth parallel in force. By the ninth, however, U.S. forces were already across the Korean dividing line. Moreover, despite doubts that the Soviets were as interested in helping them in Korea as in distracting the Americans from a NATO buildup with a punishing war in Asia, the Chinese felt compelled to join the Korean fighting. They hoped not only to prevent an American military presence on their Manchurian border, save Kim’s Communist regime, and inspire other Third World revolutionaries to continue their struggles against Western imperialism, but also to bolster a domestic campaign to suppress “reactionaries and reactionary activities.”
By sending U.S. troops into North Korea, Truman understood that he might be risking a war with China, which could escalate into a wider conflict with the Soviet Union. Yet he and his advisers believed otherwise. True, an occupation of North Korea would bring American troops within hailing distance of China’s Manchurian border. But since Washington had given every indication that it would not support Chiang’s return to the mainland, Truman hoped that Peking would not see an American presence above the thirty-eighth parallel as a threat to its rule. He assumed that the Communist government, for all its revolutionary rhetoric, understood that the United States had a history of friendly dealings with China and that Russia was its more natural rival. Moreover, if the Chinese knew anything at all about American politics, they would understand that no current Washington administration could let another Communist act of aggression go unpunished. A Democratic, liberal Truman government had to take account of the conservative outcry against a president who could be seen as soft on communism.
While Truman’s views on America’s China policy and the constraints on his administration from domestic politics were realistic, his assumption that China’s Communist leadership shared his outlook was wishful thinking. Understandably, Peking viewed the United States as unfriendly to a Communist victory in the civil war and to Communist governments everywhere. Consequently, a U.S. occupation of the Korean peninsula was likely to be seen as threatening communism’s survival in Korea and China. Truman wasn’t blind to these Chinese concerns, but the domestic pressures on him to win a “victory” in the Cold War by overturning a Communist regime were too compelling for him and Acheson to limit the fighting to South Korea’s rescue. After so many perceived setbacks in the Cold War—Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, including East Germany and East Berlin, the Soviet A-bomb, communism’s triumph in China, and threats of additional conquests in Asia and Africa—pressure for a rollback or defeat of one Communist regime, however limited a victory it might be, seemed irresistible.
Because conquering North Korea risked a wider war with China, Truman wished to give himself some political cover from Republican attacks. He was eager to fully identify MacArthur, who enjoyed iconic status among American conservatives and remained a military hero to millions of Americans, with decisions to occupy North Korea and bring the peninsula under UN control. If such ambitious policies provoked a wider conflict, it could not then be seen as simply Harry Truman’s war. In addition, with congressional elections less than a month away, regardless of what happened in the fighting, Truman saw political advantage in associating himself with so popular a general.
On October 12, three days after U.S. troops had crossed into North Korea, Truman invited MacArthur to meet him on October 15 either at Oahu or at Wake Island, if the general felt he could not be absent from his command for the time required to travel to Hawaii. MacArthur chose Wake.
Both men approached the meeting suspicious of the other’s motives. Truman saw MacArthur as a potential political adversary, whose highest priority was self-aggrandizement. “Have to talk to God’s right-hand man tomorrow,” Truman scathingly wrote a friend as he flew across the Pacific. MacArthur saw the conference as orchestrated for “political reasons” or as nothing more than a “political junket” and resented the distraction from his duties that compelled him to make an eight-thousand-mile round trip.
It was far less than Truman’s journey, which was nearly twenty-nine thousand miles across seven time zones. The president obviously saw compelling strategic and political reasons for making so long a trip.
MacArthur, who had never met the president, did not make the best of first impressions: dressed informally in a shirt open at the neck and a much-traveled garrison cap, he did not salute the president as he descended from his plane but warmly grasped his hand and gripped his right arm with his left hand—what MacArthur called his number-one handshake. Truman reciprocated the general’s warm welcome. But on a car ride from the plane to a nearby Quonset hut, where the two would speak alone for half an hour, Truman immediately came to the principal point for the conference: his worry about Chinese intervention in the war. Accompanied on the trip by General Omar Bradley, the only high-ranking military man the president brought along, and three State Department officials—Averell Harriman, Dean Rusk, and Phillip Jessup—Truman was most concerned not with battlefield maneuvers but with the possibility that seizing North Korea might result in a bigger war.
At a subsequent meeting with Truman’s and MacArthur’s aides that lasted less than two hours in a one-story civil aeronautics building at the airfield, Truman came back to his fear of a larger conflict. MacArthur could not have been more reassuring: he saw an end to formal resistance in five or six weeks, by Thanksgiving, predicting that the Eighth Army could return to Japan by Christmas and U.S. troops could be out of Korea by January 1951, after countrywide Korean elections. When the president reiterated his interest in keeping this a limited war, MacArthur saw “very little” chance of either Soviet or Chinese intervention. Should Chinese troops, who lacked air cover, enter the fighting and try to recapture Pyongyang, “there would be the greatest slaughter.”
MacArthur, who described himself as eager to return to his duties in Japan and Korea, declined the president’s invitation to lunch and flew away after Truman had pinned a Distinguished Service Medal—the fifth in his military career—on his chest. Truman flew back to San Francisco, where he gave a speech carried around the world by the Voice of America. In it he described MacArthur’s greatness as a soldier and the “unity in the aims and conduct of our foreign policy.” If anything were to go wrong now, was partly the president’s unstated message, the responsibility lay in a shared decision that relied on the judgments of the field commander as well as the policy makers in Washington.
Despite MacArthur’s assurances about Chinese or Soviet nonintervention, Truman would have done better to trust his concerns about a larger war. But the optimism generated by MacArthur’s rout of the North Koreans was combined with concerns about a campaign of vilification if the president halted the offensive at the thirty-eighth parallel. For Kennan, who had confidently assured NATO ambassadors in Washington that the United States “had no intention of doing more than to restore the status quo ante” it was a shock to see U.S. forces moving north of the dividing line.
Truman couldn’t res
ist the assumption in U.S. military and diplomatic circles that there would be an easy victory over Pyongyang. Such a victory would not only buoy American spirits, which Communist gains had dimmed, but also send a forceful message to Moscow, Peking, and foes everywhere that the United States was determined to stand its ground in the Cold War at whatever cost in blood and treasure.
The Korean War now became a toxic brew for everyone who supported it. No one—not the Koreans, North and South, nor the Chinese, the Soviets, or the Americans—could escape the negative consequences of extended fighting on the peninsula.
During the last week of October, advance South Korean units ran into resistance from some 200,000 Chinese troops, who had crossed from Manchuria into Korea. And by the first week of November, though MacArthur asked permission to bomb the bridges over the Yalu River to halt the flood of Chinese men and matériel, he continued to insist that a quick victory was within easy reach and would result from an end-the-war offensive beginning in mid-November.
By November 28, however, with Chinese infantry and armor staging a massive assault on ROK and U.S. troops that drove them back below Pyongyang in less than two weeks, MacArthur had to concede that his command “now faced … conditions beyond its control … an entirely new war.” He rationalized his misleading predictions about an easy conquest of North Korea by asserting that China’s large-scale involvement in the fighting had resulted from Mao’s understanding through British spies that the United States would confine its combat to Korea and not carry the war into China. Although it was evident to MacArthur that Washington had no appetite for a larger conflict with China, which might trigger a world war with the Soviet Union, this was not clear to Peking; its decision to engage the Americans in a full-blown ground war was accompanied by considerable anxiety that U.S. air forces might strike Chinese cities with atomic bombs.
The fear was well advised. In June and July, National Security Council and State Department officials discussed not whether to use nuclear weapons but what conditions might make their use acceptable—to avert defeat, or if they would not result in “excessive destruction of noncombatants.” No one discussed what “excessive” might mean—more than the numbers that had perished at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Shortly after the Chinese successfully intervened in the fighting, MacArthur asked permission to drop thirty-four atomic bombs on Manchuria that could create a radioactive belt of cobalt that would last for at least sixty years and provide a defense against any invasion of Korea from the north.
The Chinese willingness to fight nevertheless rested on the belief that Washington would be reluctant to risk a world war with a nuclear-armed Russia by striking directly at China. Peking also assumed that its greater manpower would prevent U.S. domination of the peninsula, from which it could threaten stability in China, and that it could use the war to eliminate remaining domestic pockets of resistance to Communist rule. In November and December, Stalin encouraged Mao to defeat U.S. aggression in Korea and promised to support his war effort with supplies and Soviet air cover over Manchuria. As from the beginning of the fighting, Stalin was less interested in driving the Americans off the peninsula than in tying them down in a war that would limit their military presence in Europe and force them to take account of Soviet and Chinese opposition to U.S. bases in Japan.
The miscalculations on the part of all the leaders who facilitated the Korean fighting inflicted a heavy price on each of their countries. Not surprisingly, the loss of military personnel and civilians from the ground and air campaigns on the peninsula that lasted over three years destroyed a generation of Koreans—about 3 million, approximately 10 percent of the population, north and south, were killed, missing, or wounded, with another 5 million displaced or forced to become refugees. The United States had over 36,000 dead, and over 90,000 wounded.
The Chinese suffered as many as 900,000 killed in combat. In November and December, they drove U.S. and South Korean troops back to the parallel, but at a huge cost in troops and matériel. And although China’s population, exceeding 550 million, gave it seemingly endless reinforcements, the U.S. advantage in airpower and weaponry threatened to increase China’s battlefield casualties to unbearable levels and to turn North Korea into a wasteland. Surely, the Chinese and Korean militaries knew the extent of the devastation from World War Il’s conventional bombs and napalm. Nor could Mao be confident that Washington wouldn’t resort to atomic weapons if it faced defeat in Korea. Yet the initial success of the Chinese armies had deluded Mao into thinking that he could expel the Americans from the peninsula and trumpet a people’s victory over imperialism. Consequently, he dismissed ceasefire proposals that assured South Korea’s autonomy and halted the Chinese advance at the thirty-eighth parallel.
Mao’s refusal to settle for a negotiated peace that rescued North Korea was a miscalculation for which his troops would pay dearly. Judging from the millions who perished in famines and the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s, Mao, like Stalin, didn’t hesitate to sacrifice lives for the sake of communism and his personal rule. “The more people you kill, the more revolutionary you are,” he said.
The Soviets, who had hoped to reduce U.S. militancy by trapping it in a debilitating conflict, were anguished by the opposite result. In response to the war, the Americans not only vastly expanded their defense preparedness, increasing the size of their armed forces and constructing a larger, more powerful nuclear arsenal, but also built NATO, partly with German units beginning in 1955, into a formidable defense arm and signed a Japanese peace treaty that included long-term U.S. bases in the islands. These unwanted developments, especially the prospect of a rearmed Germany, made Moscow less secure and more driven to invest scarce resources in its defense.
China’s entrance into the fighting, which now dramatically increased U.S. casualties, demoralized Americans and made them more vulnerable to the exaggerated fears and remedies for world problems favored by right-wing politicians. In the early weeks of 1951, hopes of overturning Kim’s regime and preserving South Korea from Communist control faded as Chinese forces captured Seoul and pushed the defenders into a new perimeter above Pusan, forcing plans to evacuate the peninsula.
At the end of the month, however, U.S.-led UN forces regained the initiative when General Matthew Ridgway replaced General Walton Walker, who had been killed in a jeep accident, as field commander. A tough, determined World War II paratrooper, who dismissed warnings that his troops would have to flee Korea, Ridgway, Joint Chiefs chairman Omar Bradley said, provided “brilliant, driving, uncompromising leadership.” He sparked a new offensive that inflicted large losses on the Communists, recaptured Seoul, and drove the Chinese back above the parallel by the end of March.
Yet even with these victories, Americans had lost faith in the wisdom of fighting in Korea, and in Truman’s leadership. Initially, 65 percent in a poll thought it a good idea for the United States to have entered the war. By January, at the low ebb of battlefield fortunes, 66 percent of a survey wanted the president “to pull our troops out of Korea as fast as possible.” Forty-nine percent now believed U.S. participation in the war a mistake, with only 38 percent endorsing it as a wise policy. Even after Ridgway had launched his winter offensive, 50 percent said the war was an error, and just 36 percent favored a second invasion of the North. By better than a three-to-one margin—30 percent to 9 percent—Americans thought that Russia was defeating the United States in the Cold War.
The Korean defeats dropped Truman’s standing to new lows, and the country favored reckless actions to beat the Communists. The president’s approval ratings fell from 43 percent in the summer to 36 percent in January and a miserable 26 percent in February, with 57 percent negative about his performance. By a margin of 64 to 28 percent, Americans said that in the future the Congress rather than the president should decide when soldiers should be sent “overseas.” As in 1946, political commentators joked, “To err is Truman.”
Americans knew that the best way out of foreign dangers was the asse
rtion of the country’s superior military power. At a press conference on November 30, Truman responded to a reporter’s question about using atomic bombs against the Chinese in Korea by saying that this was under consideration and that the field commander had the freedom of decision. Although Truman undoubtedly was only trying to frighten the Chinese, the American public, unlike governments in Europe and Asia, did not take exception to his comments.
The Cold War had frightened the country into favoring extreme actions to preserve the nation’s security. Sixty-one percent supported using atomic bombs in a world war to stop Communist expansion, saying we should hit them with nuclear weapons before they struck us. A majority of Americans thought that the fighting in Korea meant we were already in World War III; 81 percent believed it was a war we had to fight if Russia were not to become the “ruling power of the world.” Fearful that a full-scale conflict with China could last four years, about the length of World War II, a plurality of Americans supported using atomic bombs against her as well. The dread of a nuclear war, which had been so prominent immediately after 1945, had given way to the conviction that using nuclear arms against ruthless Communists was essential to America’s survival.
A bitter divide now opened up in the United States about future policy in Korea. Because conservatives led by MacArthur and Joe McCarthy believed that the fighting on the peninsula was the opening round in a global showdown with the Communists, they urged an attack on mainland China, including the use of Chiang’s forces on Taiwan, to bring down Mao and free Korea from Communist power. By contrast, Truman and Acheson favored a ceasefire that reestablished South Korea’s autonomy and left Kim in control of North Korea. China’s insistence that an end to the fighting include a U.S. removal of the Seventh Fleet from the Taiwan Strait, leaving the island vulnerable to a Communist attack, and that the Peking government replace Chiang’s as China’s UN representative undermined prospects for a quick end to the war.