The Korean War Revisited
By Beans Reardon
from the June 1997; Wolgan Choson (pp. 112-16)The writer served with the U.S. military in Korea in the 1950s and keeps current through visits, personal contacts, and the Internet.
The Korean War started just after my freshman year at college and just as I had started to read Churchill's volumes on World War II. The war that was to kill and wound millions, blast Korea from antiquity into the 20th century, revive a U.S. military establishment ruined by the Truman administration, transform NATO into a real alliance, and show that Communism could after all be stopped got only a one-column headline on the NYT front page. All I knew about Korea was from an encyclopedia article which said that Korea had been occupied by Japan just as it was about to gain a sense of modern identity, so that, as the article said, the birth of Korean nationalism amounted to a "death birth." For the first few days it appeared that the U.S. would not react effectively and that the North Korean occupation of the south would soon be a fait accompli. Having grown up during World War II, my cousin, also a classmate, and I were Munich oriented, and using the cliche from the early 1940s, we pessimistically wrote off our initial response as another case of "too little and too late." Truman and Acheson proved us wrong, of course. They were also Munich oriented. They knew Churchill and had read his savage indictment of the western democracies for their failure to react to Hitler's early aggression when he was still weak enough to be stopped. Remembering the 1930s, they thought that by intervening in Korea they could head off a third world war. Before long it became clear that a far away country about which we knew nothing would be defended after all. It also became clear that the cost in human suffering might be horrendous. I wondered if it would be worth it. I asked my father, "What if the people in the south don't want to be defended?" But he was Munich oriented too. "Maybe they have to be defended whether they want it or not," he answered.
In November 1949, on being stationed in Tokyo as a captain in the military history section, James F. Schnabel, who was later to write one volume of the official history of the U.S. Army in the Korean War, attended an intelligence briefing for new officers at which the briefer frankly stated that North Korea was expected to attack and conquer the Republic of Korea in the coming summer, a development which seemed to be accepted as regrettable but unavoidable (Richard Whelan, Drawing the Line, Little, Brown, & Co., 1990, p. 90).
It was well known, of course, that from late 1949 through early 1950, MG Charles Willoughby, intelligence chief at MacArthur's headquarters in Tokyo, had sent to Washington several reports indicating a North Korean attack. In March, he forwarded a ROK intelligence report that an invasion had been set for March but postponed until June. But he added his own view that an attack was unlikely. In May, Defense Minister Sin Song Mo stated in a press conference that the north had built up its forces along the border and that it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that an attack would come soon. He closed with a plea for more arms, but BG William L. Roberts, the KMAG chief, said he did not foresee an attack (Whelan, page 90). At about the same time, James Hausman, as advisor to the ROK Army chief of staff, was also trying to persuade Roberts that an attack was coming, but Roberts was not receptive. "I go along with you most of the time, Hausman," he said, "but this time I don't agree." United Press Seoul bureau chief Jack James, later Asia Foundation representative in Seoul, also knew something was up. Indeed he "scooped" the Korean War because he expected it. He went regularly to the Seoul offices of the nominal governors of North Korean provinces to arrange interviews with line crossers. But from early June, there were no more line crossers. The border had been sealed off.
In spite of the view reflected in the Tokyo briefing, Willoughby, Roberts, and most American officials apparently believed war would not come unless Stalin was prepared to fight World War III. When the war did come, they thought it meant Stalin would make a move elsewhere if he should be successful in Korea. They knew nothing of Korea but were thinking globally, and they were so convinced that Moscow directed Communism everywhere that the possibility of war at Pyongyang's initiative escaped them. What can be called the essential Koreanness of the Korean War was missed from the start, and the misconception of the conflict as a "proxy war" between the USSR and the U.S. prevailed for decades until new scholarship based on documents released in Moscow revealed that Kim Il Sung had been much more the initiator than the puppet. The misperception of North Korea as a kind of adjunct of the USSR/PRC threat in Northeast Asia persisted for decades and seems to have influenced strategic thinking during the Carter period and even thereafter.
In 1955, three years before he was victimized in the course of preparations for the Cho Pong Am-Progressive Party case, Pak Chong Ho, former finance department chief of the Pyongan Namdo Worker's Party, told me he had learned that Choe Yong Kon had expressed doubts to Kim Il Sung about the wisdom of starting the war. Choe argued that while it would take only two weeks to occupy the south, the outlook would change completely if the U.S. should intervene. Kim Il Sung said the Russians had assured him this would not happen. One wonders what he may have told the Russians. In his "Founding of a Dynasty in North Korea," Lim Un (pen name of Ho Chin, a former North Korean official who sought refuge in the USSR) points out that the Korean War did immeasurable damage to Communism throughout the world and argues that war was not the only road Kim could have taken.
PRC advisor Peng Tehuai and Kim Il-Sung"If he had developed the people's economy, democratized the society, developed culture, the arts and education, added to the achievements of democratic reform in North Korea, and kept alive the vitality of socialist institutions, he might have been able to bring to our side more people who were groaning under the rule of South Korean reactionary institutions and open the road to peaceful unification of the fatherland."
Of course, Kim did not do this. Why not? Kim's defenders have argued that if his decision to attack was prompted by his patriotic enthusiasm for unification, no moral condemnation attaches to it. This, of course, is debatable on its own ground, but Suh Dae Sook (in his biography of Kim Il Sung) and others point out that Kim's motive may not have been so idealistic. Kim never pushed for peaceful unification and seems to have had a conviction that the only proper way to bring about unification was by war, as Mao and his colleagues had done. His economic plan for North Korea was in trouble. And, of course, the south Korean element in the party was very strong at that time, and Kim had to face the prospect that peaceful unification would not necessarily leave him in control.
Much later, former North Korean agent Chang Yong Un, who had operated for years in Japan, in explaining why he finally defected, pointed out (in a 10 March 1997 Newsweek interview), "Kim Il Sung's idea of reunification was to take over the south by force and liberate what he called the 'oppressed south Korean people'.... Our South Korean operation was not helping to promote reunification. We were simply used as a tool to realize Kim's ambition."
Former East German intelligence chief Marcus Wolf has observed that Stalin actually killed more Communists than Hitler did. Similarly, Lim Un points out that Kim Il Sung admired and imitated Stalin more than anyone, and that Kim himself killed more North Korean generals than were killed in combat during the Korean War. The common theme here is that Kim made critical decisions in his own interest, not in the interest of North Korea as a country, and this same decision making characteristic is basic to the Kim family regime, now headed by his son.
Somehow this point is often ignored or swept aside. At present, many Koreans seem to be thinking globally, i.e., applying developed country standards of behavior, thereby missing the defining characteristic of the North Korean system. High-level Koreans and Americans alike publicly pronounce North Korea's need for reform and opening and urge North Korea to abandon confrontation and to recognize that reconciliation and cooperation are the best course. This is so reasonable and morally sound that we may forget to ask a simple question: "best" for whom? To put it another way, what do we mean when we say "North Korea"? Are we talking about the north as a piece of geography where some 24 million people live, North Korea as a state, or the North Korean economy, or are we talking about the Kim family regime which runs North Korea and makes all the big decisions? These would seem to be key distinctions, but notice how often the foregoing are lumped together as if they were one and the same! As Yi Chong Min, formerly with Sejong and now at Rand, pointed out in a paper presented at a conference for "Conventional Net Assessment in Northeast Asia" in Seoul last August, "The key question is not whether North Korea needs to revive a dying economy, but whether North Korea's leaders can afford to undertake meaningful reforms without endangering regime survival." He went on to note that unfortunately, no one has shown a connection between the objective need of North Korea as a country for reforms and the willingness of the Kim family regime to undertake reforms, or even their ability to do so without fatal collateral damage.
Of course, for millions of ordinary Koreans just trying to get through their lives in north and south, reconciliation and cooperation would indeed seem to be the best option. But what would happen to Pyongyang's leaders if they should adopt such a course? How long could they claim any kind of useful role? What could they bring to the process of cooperation that would justify their continued existence? Their economic model and management skills? Their mastery of high-tech information systems? Their achievements in the humanities? The clarity of their political thought? How many of them will know how to do anything productive when rational economic principles are applied to the entire peninsula? What happens when isolation and information control -- such necessary pillars of regime support up to now -- break down and leave only a residue of crippling incapacity? In short, why should the Kim family regime not believe that continuing to subject their population to the pain of economic failure is a safer option than to risk a potentially destabilizing process of revitalization which would ultimately fall under the control of harsh and vindictive compatriots? Suppose we ask, "Who has reason to fear peace?" Absent war, the economic gap in favor of the ROK will only widen with every passing year. It is hard to see how this can translate over time into anything other than economic domination by the south and ultimately ROK-led unification. Anything else can only be an interim condition, even if prolonged, and the longer the interim lasts, the greater the south's superiority and the more certain the final result. The ROK, therefore, has no reason to regard an extended period of peace and economic cooperation as a serious threat to regime or state survival. If we could make the same statement for North Korea under the Kim family regime, north-south dialogue would already be a fact and peaceful reintegration a confident prediction. Unhappily, the dilemma for Pyongyang's leaders is that their doctrine and policies are like ropes around their necks, while reform and opening would pull the trap door from beneath their feet. Even more unhappily, their dilemma could become ours.
