Blundering into battle with China

The Korean war


Oct 4th 2007
From The Economist print edition

SOME old men keep in a half-forgotten file their medal, inscribed with bureaucratic precision: “For service in defence of the principles of the charter of the United Nations”. That was always humbug. The Korean war was an American venture intended to contain the newly victorious Chinese government of Mao Zedong, believed, quite wrongly, to be Moscow's puppet. David Halberstam was too reliable a story-teller to pretend otherwise.

His huge, sadly posthumous book spares just one sentence for the manoeuvre whereby the American delegation whisked the necessary resolution through the UN machine when a brief boycott by Stalin's delegation prevented it from applying its veto. He writes of “UN forces”, barely mentioning those that were not American, and skips through the last two years of static conflict in a couple of pages. His accounts of battles are vivid enough, but exist mainly to add conviction to his central proposition.

His real interest is the sequence of decisions by which America provoked China's intervention and missed chances to end the fighting. The central figure, and villain, is the supreme commander in Tokyo, General Douglas MacArthur. Earlier, MacArthur had brilliantly conducted the war in the Pacific and laid the foundations for the Japanese to build their astonishing state. But, old, stubborn and racially contemptuous of his adversaries, he aligned himself with Washington's “China lobby” and with Chiang Kai-shek's just-defeated nationalist regime. His strategic intelligence was compiled by a fantasist. And he despised his political masters to the point where he refused to salute his commander-in-chief, President Harry Truman.

Mr Halberstam believes that MacArthur, backed by Republican politicians, challenged the constitutional arrangements for civil supremacy that Abraham Lincoln had affirmed during the civil war. The constitution, in its incarnation as Truman, eventually won, and another wartime general, the admirable Dwight Eisenhower, nailed down this victory.

When MacArthur's strategic blunders brought China into the war, the Americans, overwhelmingly superior in technology, armament and logistics, were routed. They clawed their way back, but only to stalemate. The Chinese had no aircraft (Stalin, sensibly enough, had broken his promise to provide them), only such heavy artillery as the retreating Americans abandoned to them and no portable radios to co-ordinate their infantry. At one point, Mr Halberstam claims, their 300,000 men were almost starving, with only 300 trucks for food and ammunition.

But America's soldiers, tied to the valley roads by the weight of their gear and not trained to march, were victims of an enemy that could climb the hills overlooking their rearguard. The Chinese soldiers, even when their commanding hilltops glowed like cigarette-butts beneath tonnes of blazing napalm, would manhandle their mortars from deep-dug shelters and strike with deadly effect. All lessons from old wars were irrelevant.

Plenty of books tell the story of the Korean war. Mr Halberstam understood what it meant for America. Both sides thought they were fighting to unify a divided peninsula. The strange result of their struggle was to create two nations, one rich, the other mad. The world lives precariously with that. No peace treaty has yet put a formal end to the war.