Blowback - S3 Episode 6 - "National Smile Week"

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

Gen. MacArthur executes his revenge.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In September 1950, British journalist Reginald Thompson flew over the scene at Incheon, a port city off Korea's west coast. Beneath us lay the wide, sheltered waterway of the Incheon approaches. Island and land encircled, yet dangerously deceptive, with its shoals and sandbanks and its immense tidal rise and fall. The great ships of war, gray and beautiful at the moorings, a host of cargo vessels and small craft bustling between the big ships and the smoking ruin of all that was left of the port of engine. Now and then, puffs of smoke came softly from the muscles of naval guns, waving lazily like huge, indolent fingers in their turrets.

In the opening months of the war, the North Koreans had humiliated the Americans. Now, General MacArthur had struck back. Speak about this last sign. Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Colwyn. And this is Episode 6, National Smile Week. By now, the Korean War is in full swing. Last time we saw how, in summer of 1950, the Korean People's Army from North Korea,

spilled into the South and overwhelmed the forces of the U.S.-backed Singman-Re government. The Truman administration, which had been completely silent on the growing conflict in the weeks leading up to the event, snapped into action, without informing Congress, sending troops to Korea and U.S. Navy ships to block the Taiwan straight. As the northern forces rolled down the peninsula, the Americans and the South Koreans adopted a scorched earth policy

of mass executions and death camps. This episode, we'll see how Truman's right hand in the Pacific, General Douglas MacArthur, plotted and executed the reversal of this near-total North Korean victory. We'll also check in with another general, William Dean, who has been captured by the North Koreans and observes the war from, as it were, the other side. We'll also start to see how the war is covered at home in America, fueled by and feeding into the emerging red scare. And perhaps most disturbingly, we'll start to detect a deeper agenda among some in the American elite,

including MacArthur, who wished to broaden the war to provoke a nuclear standoff with China and the Soviet Union. men who've seen some of the bitterest fighting of the war. Their destination for base hospitals in Japan. Though wounded, their spirit is high while their buddies are nursed back to fighting fitness. And at home, their former leader in World War II, General Eisenhower, says, Americans are dying in Korea tonight. They are dying for ideals they have been taught to cherish more than life itself. Masuda Hajimu writes about how ordinary Americans, shaped by the nascent propaganda of the Cold War,

took part in creating the Cold War reality. Ordinary people were not just sitting back. Many began fighting in their own capacities and neighborhoods. Longshoremen in New York and Boston, for instance, began refusing to discharge tons of Soviet red crab meat. Similarly, concerned citizens in San Francisco touched off a heated debate as to whether a series of murals in the lobby of the main downtown post office represented art or communist propaganda. Glancing over hundreds of letters to the president, Masuda Hajimu notices that most never even mention Korea.

Instead, they focus on the Kremlin and Stalin, implying, he writes, that many Americans assumed the Korean War began with an invasion of Soviet forces. In fact, nearly two-thirds of respondents to a Gallup poll believed that the United States was already engaged in World War III, and that the Russians would drop the atomic bomb on American cities. 70% of Gallup respondents supported higher taxes to build a larger army and navy, causing the Republican representative from New York, Jacob Javitz, to say, quote, I think the American people are way ahead of their leaders in the things they are willing to do

to defeat this communist menace as we see it in Korea. Once wider war kicked off in the summer of 1950, almost 300 journalists flowed into Korea, with most Westerners embedding under the wing of American and allied troops. On June 28, Keyes Beach of the Chicago Daily News Foreign News Service led his report on the war in Korea with the line, quote, I have a feeling that I have just witnessed the beginning of the Third World War. Beach and two other reporters, he claimed, had almost been blown up by an exploding bridge on their way out of Seoul, an incident we mentioned last episode. Despite this ominous feeling, or perhaps because of it,

American newspapers zealously carried news of the fresh war against the Reds. The New York Times' military editor Hanson Baldwin managed to paint the North Koreans as successors not only to the Mongol armies of yore, but also successors to Hitler's Germany. Quote, we are facing an army of barbarians in Korea, but they are barbarians as trained, as relentless, as reckless of life and as skilled in the tactics of the kind of war they fight as the hordes of

Genghis Khan. They have taken a leaf from the Nazi book of Blitzkrieg and are employing all the weapons of fear and terror. The Times would go on to print characterizations of Koreans as locusts. Behind the Korean, Baldwin's articles put it, quote, stand the hordes of Asia. ahead of the Korean lies the hope of loot. A headline in the Bedford Indiana Times Mail on August 9th. Quote, doughboys, that's U.S. soldiers,

doughboys clap hands like team, chase gooks in Korea. A two-part feature for the Associated Press was published widely across the country that same day, headlined, quote, G.I. Joe decides the Gukes, North Korean soldiers, are pretty good fighting men.

This racial slur appears to derive from the U.S. occupation of MacArthur's old stomping ground, the Philippines. In fact, it had followed the general into the fight against the Japanese in World War II, and now it had followed him into Korea. In fact, it would outlive him, later flourishing again in the American War on Vietnam. From a country where open racial segregation was still the law of the land, American coverage of the Korean War carried the tone of officially sanctioned white supremacy. Take it from the Chief Counsel at the Nuremberg trial.

the American lawyer Telford Taylor, quote, individual lives are not valued so highly in Eastern Morays, and it is totally unrealistic of us to expect the individual Korean soldier to follow our most elevated precepts of warfare. Or take it from General MacArthur's intelligence chief, who labeled the North Koreans, quote, half men with blank faces, or take it from another American battalion commander who referred to the North Koreans as, quote, trained monkeys. So perhaps after the North took Seoul, the people living there weren't consistent. including that it was propaganda, when the Communist paper Liberation Daily concluded, quote, the Americans do not recognize Koreans as human beings.

Bruce Cummings notices another aspect of the U.S. coverage. Early on, the New York Times had found a queer tone in North Korean statements to the United Nations. They had, quote, a certain ring of passion about them, as if they really believed what they were saying about American imperialism. And it wasn't just the sincerity of their words that surprised Americans. The U.S. doughboys soon found the North Koreans were kicking their asses. Quote, after being pushed back steadily for five weeks, G.I. Joe has decided that what he calls the gooks are first-rate fighting men,

AP correspondent Hal Boyle reported. And what's more, it was coming as a surprise to the U.S. soldiers that they were even still in Korea by that point. Quote, I still can't realize I'm here, said one soldier. If anyone had told me 60 days ago that I'd be fighting in Korea, I wouldn't have believed he was anything but crazy. As Cummings puts it, quote, it did not dawn on most Americans that anti-colonial fighters might have something to fight about. Despite having already compared Koreans to the Nazis, in the face of American defeats, the New York Times military editor, Hansen

Baldwin, then decided to switch things up and recommended we take a page from the Nazis playbook. quote, in their extensive war against the Russian partisans, the Germans found that the only answer to guerrillas was to, quote, win friends and influence people among the civilian population. The actual pacification of the country, Korea, means just that. America needed to persuade Korean hearts and minds, he wrote, of these simple, primitive, and barbaric peoples, end quote. What's more, the historian Stephen Casey writes, American newspaper editors believed that they needed not only to persuade Korean hearts and minds,

but also that Europe needed to start pulling its fair share in the Korean effort. Quote, newspapers as diverse as the scripts Howard Chain, the Denver Post, New York Journal of Commerce, Kansas City Star, and Christian Science Monitor had all reacted to the growing defeats in Korea by declaring that, quote, this is a UN show, and the others should be sending their soldiers and equipment to fight in the police action, end quote. One thing worth mentioning here, too. was also around this time that prominent political voices and media institutions began talking about censorship, only not how you might think. Terrified that images and news from the front could spoil

Americans' appetite for war, Casey notes that the Washington Post published a summer 1950 editorial, urging General MacArthur to begin instituting censorship pronto. That's right, the Post was asking for censorship. Quote, the decisions of editors must be made thousands of miles from the scene, and in view of the handicaps of time, distances, and ignorance of the immediate issues, these decisions are preordained to be foolishly overcautious or unintentionally risky. But MacArthur, perhaps planning for a moment when he would very much like to have the news media present brushed off these concerns. After all, there was no immediate anti-war outpouring across the country. Gallup public opinion surveys, in fact, showed that strong

majorities of Americans were supportive of a wartime mobilization and even of higher taxes to fund it. Now, that's not to say there was no dissent. In a newspaper in Tennessee, an AP article ran alongside a large photo titled, Rioters engage New York police over Korean War. The caption, Unscheduled Action at New York Union Square ends a peace in Korea meeting. In the melee, one demonstrator hits the ground as a policeman defends himself against others in his attempt to disperse the rioters. Irony is added by a shop window placard, reading, It's a picnic.

There were very few unorthodox voices in the Western press. One of them was a Brit, Reginald Thompson, whom we mentioned earlier, a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. Thompson, picking up on the atmosphere we've been describing, wrote of the character of the U.S. troops, quote, "'Mostly the Marines seemed good-natured and good-tempered, and less murderous the farther forward one went.

But they never spoke of the enemy as though they were people, but as one might speak of apes. If they remarked a dead Korean body of whatever sex, uniformed or ununiformed, it was simply dead gook or good gook. I don't think it ever occurred to them that these Koreans were men, women, and children, with homes, loves, hates, aspirations, and often very great courage. End quote. And we mentioned last episode, the British Daily Worker,

whose correspondent Alan Winnington was one of the only Western reporters who accurately reported on American and South Korean war crimes, denied at the time but vindicated decades later. Another standout voice was Wilfred Burchett, whom we've read from a bit as well. Burchett, an Australian radical who had covered post-war Europe and campaigned at home in Australia against the atomic bomb, would cover aspects of the Korean War few other Westerners would touch. As a result, Birchett would end up being branded a spy by the West and was banned from reentering his home country for 20 years. At this point in the war, between the northern victory across the peninsula, Birchett wrote, quote, no matter what the Americans were able to salvage afterwards,

American imperialist prestige can never live down, the humiliating military and political defeat suffered by American arms and American policy in those first two months of the war. For William F. Dean, the U.S. General who had by now been captured by the Korean People's Army, life was tolerable, if boring and repetitive. But one day, Dean writes in his memoir, things were shaken up a little, by a role reversal. Guards came in and took me to the Commandant's office. The Commandant was rather a handsome man, wearing North Korean Army blue breeches and black boots, but a white shirt and a civilian coat. He needed to shave badly and had the only green eyes I've ever seen in a Korean.

He was friendly and apologetic for having put me in a cell. Dean has then questioned about many things, amusingly to him, quote, where is Singman Rhee? To which he said he had no idea. Then, from the Korean officer, You can see how your forces have been driven back. So if you were released, would you continue to fight us? I said, yes, that's what I want to do.

That's why I've been trying to get back, so I could fight again. I know I can do better next time and kill more of you for the men we lose. He didn't care for that. Finally, he said, General, you're a brave man, but you're very ignorant politically. That ended the political part of the discussion, but he couldn't resist a little something personal. He said, I've seen you before, General. Even if you don't remember me, I was a political prisoner right in this same prison when you inspected it as military governor. But I'm going to treat you better than you treated me.

General Dean didn't have a quick comeback for that one. As we've seen, by August 1950, the situation on the ground in Korea for the Allied forces had deteriorated, even though they had a significant advantage by this point in manpower, at least five times as many tanks as the People's Army, as well as control over the skies. the United Nations forces, which were American-led, as we've discussed, these guys numbered about 140,000 men to 150,000 men, split about 60% American and 40% South Korean and British. Throw some Australians in there for good measure, or worse, depending on your perspective.

This period of the conflict is sometimes designated as the Battle of the Busan perimeter, but it wasn't a familiar kind of engagement along the lines of what troops had seen in World War II. According to the perspective of the Allied soldiers fighting this war, this was a guerrilla war, a war of attrition that was slowly breaking the grip of American and U.S.-backed forces on the peninsula. Last episode, we talked about how General MacArthur had been issued a quote-unquote blank check as the UN commander in Korea. With the Allied command's military presence in Korea in jeopardy, MacArthur had gone back to the drawing board, and in mid-August he came up with an idea,

an amphibious invasion of the Korean port city of Incheon. Landing at Incheon would put a well-equipped American force behind the far-advanced North Korean lines. But surprise amphibious landings, in which men and supplies are deposited on shore and exposed to devastating tides, artillery, and enemy gunners, these have been considered among the most difficult possible military maneuvers since before there were artillery and machine guns.

Other members of the military brass were skeptical. that MacArthur's idea could even work, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Omar Bradley, a World War II rival of MacArthur's who had once testified before Congress that the A-bomb perhaps precluded amphibious invasions from ever happening again. Others were open to an Incheon adventure, but insisted that UN forces prepare for such an operation well into October. MacArthur would have none of it. The target date, because of the great tides at Incheon, had to be in the middle of September.

That was only weeks away. MacArthur acknowledges in his memoirs that, quote, this meant that the staging for the landing at Incheon would have to be accomplished more rapidly than that of any other large amphibious operation in modern warfare. Journalist David Halberstam, in his book on the Korean War, summed up the challenge, quote, Incheon represented a great gamble.

The enemy would have to be completely asleep for it to work because the entrance to the port was so narrow, end quote. But some of the difficulty here, in MacArthur's opinion, was actually an allied advantage in disguise. Because Incheon was populated and likely fortified, the KPA wouldn't expect the invasion to come there, miles behind enemy lines and south of the 38th parallel on the west coast of the peninsula. And because of the obvious American military and naval buildup in Japan, it was critically dubbed by some, quote, Operation Common Knowledge, further heightening the sense of anxiety about whether the element of surprise would be sufficiently

maintained. It was clear that the Americans were mobilizing for something that could change the course of the war. After several days of preliminary strikes and bombardments, McArthur's invasion of Incheon went forward on September 15th. Now, it's popularly remembered as the Incheon landing, in part because there wasn't much of a battle of Inchen to remember. Although the Navy, had attempted to remove sea mines ahead of the landing force, they found that the Korean People's Army hadn't actually mined the harbor as expected. Incheon isn't like Normandy where GIs were deposited on sandy beaches. It's a city of ports and piers. So without the mines, the Allied forces were

able to take control of the city even more easily than anticipated. Two hundred and thirty ships were mobilized and roughly 40,000 soldiers were sent to shore as a landing force over the course of the 15th of September. Kim Il-sung had only deployed about 2,000 soldiers to Incheon, which meant that the landing proceeded almost uneventfully. The Associated Press called it, quote, a gem of military precision. So close was the timing, the Allied bombardment stopped a slim 15 seconds before the Marines hit the beach. A Hearst reporter, embedded with the Eighth Army in Korea, reported that, quote, news of the Allied landing at the West Coast Korean port of Incheon had an electrifying effect on G.I.'s fighting in the southeastern corner of the peninsula today.

Well, I think we'll all be home soon, said private first class Thomas Steinman, age 26 of Buffalo, New York. This looks like the beginning of the end. The next day, the United Nations Command launched an offensive from Busan in the southeast that sought to recapture the territory from the KPA. Remember, Busan is a port city on Korea's southern coast, meaning that with the Incheon landing further north, the Allied forces had caught the KPA in a pincer trap. In 96 hours, writes MacArthur's biographer William Manchester, quote, half of the Inman Gun, 50,000 soldiers, was trapped between MacArthur's pincer, as Halberstam puts it.

The Incheon Landing and the campaign afterward to retake Seoul, quote, went not merely as McArthur had planned, but as he had dreamed. This isn't to say there wasn't real combat. The Marines, who were the tip of MacArthur's spear, after moving beyond Incheon, began to encounter some of the 35,000 to 40,000 troops that Kim had begun moving to protect the KPA position in Seoul. This part of the Inche landing, the subsequent fight on the quote, road to Seoul, was, in the words of the head of the First Marine Corps, one of those routine operations

that read easier in newspapers than on the ground. That Marine General's boss, Ned Almond, one of MacArthur's pet generals from Tokyo, was ordering the Marines to make maneuvers so aggressive that at a certain point his orders were outright disregarded. The head of the Marines on the ground thought, as Halberstam puts it, quote, the pressure was falsely driven,

that it reflected not the need for a quicker battlefield victory as a means of cutting off the North Korean army, but instead a diversion, reflecting an obsession with public relations the constant need from MacArthur's headquarters for glory. I.F. Stone called this a psychological as well as military turning point. Had Russia wanted war, this was the time to begin it. Soviet air power and sea power, by intervening, could have pushed the Busan defenders into the sea. The North Koreans might have done it alone if they had not been starved for supplies, for the North Koreans were desperately short of planes

and tanks, and even of heavy arms. Stone notes that even when reports of a weakened enemy were pouring out, MacArthur painted the opposite picture in his report to the UN, alleging massive munitions and manpower coming from the USSR and China. The evidence here was scant, but the upshot called for more drastic action that MacArthur was eager to provide. Stone writes, quote, had an impartial UN body dealt with the same evidence, it would have reported that there was no evidence of Russian or China.

Chinese military intervention. At first, the Korean War was not atop the list of concerns for communist China's leadership, especially with the North poised for victory in the first two months of the war. According to the authors of the book, Uncertain Partners. In fact, in a government meeting, days after the war kicked off, Mao took the opportunity to slam the United States, not about Korea, but about Taiwan, or Formosa, as it was then called. He called the recent American naval blockade separating Taiwan from mainland China an act of aggression, which, one could add, was a hard claim to refute.

But by July, Mao recognized the threat posed by the Korean War and that it would need to take precedence, and in August, the long-awaited plan to finally unite China and take Taiwan was scrapped. Quote, in a twinkling, Mao's dream of realizing China's complete unification was shattered. Mao suspected the Americans had gone to war in no small part to threaten China. So first, right Zhu, Lewis, and Goncharov, Mao had ordered Chinese anti-aircraft units to cross the Yalu River

in order to protect bridges and resources there. Then, Premier Zhao Anlai, head of the Central Military Commission, after conferring with top officers of the army, moved the fourth field army to the northeast near the Korean border. The resolution to move these troops passed the same day MacArthur was handed the keys to UN forces. Soon these troops on the border would be joined by Moore from the 30th Army and trained up with the very real expectation of going up against the Americans someday. In August, as the Americans stiffened up in Busan and MacArthur plotted his ancient comeback,

Mao had warned the North Koreans. Quote, it is excellent that the Korean people have driven the enemy into the Southern Sea, but if you push them hard into a corner and lay siege to them for a long time, they will unite rightly like clenched fists. Don't forget you are fighting with the boss of imperialism. Be prepared for the worst all the time and examine seriously the possibilities of retreat. The Chinese Central Committee, in fact,

worried that the Korean troops, quote, had advanced too far in isolation, leaving their rear area vulnerable. This is exactly what allowed MacArthur to squeeze them between Inshun and Busan a month later. Mao's warnings, Rizu and his co-authors, were relayed to Kim and Stalin. Neither took them seriously.

On August 12th, the U.S. unleashed a 500-ton bombing raid on a North Korean seaport, Roshin, awfully close to the USSR. How close? About 17 miles from the Siberian border, 110 miles from the key Soviet port city of Vladivostok. Things did not stop there.

Quote, this was followed by a series of raids and strafings along the border between Korea and Manchuria, writes I. F. Stone. Beijing, on August 28th, protested to the UN that American and British planes had strafed airfields and railways on the Chinese side of the Yalu near Antung. The U.S. Air Force denied it. But a second raid and a second protest from the communists, and the U.S. Air Force, quote, acknowledged that one of its F-51s might have strafed on Tung on August 27th.

A month later, the on-tung attack was officially admitted, as a, quote-unquote, mistake. After Incheon, the Americans fully intended to, quote-unquote, roll back North Korea's gains. The North Korean thrust southward, seemed immediately to stimulate American thinking of a thrust northward, writes Bruce Cummings. Or should we say, it stimulated John Foster Dulles' thinking in particular.

As early as June, Dulles said that in a desultory war, the Korean incident might be used to go beyond the parallel. And by July, he was joined in this by State Department official Dean Rusk. Remember, of course, that it was John Foster Dulles who had visited the South and peered over the 38th parallel just before the war broke out in June 1950. There, he had promised the South Koreans aid if the North Koreans ever attacked. Now, with the Incheon landing and a push beyond the Busan perimeter, the Americans were hot on the trail of the People's Army

and poised to push things back to the 38th parallel, the stated mission of this whole police action. By the beginning of October, the New York Times would report that virtually all major fighting against the KPA in the south, below the parallel, had ceased. With fighting along the front now stabilizing a bit, General MacArthur was preparing to do battle a bit closer to home. After fighting over the size of MacArthur's army, the General's public support for Chiang Kai Sheck and the Chinese Nationalists, and MacArthur's proud endorsement of Singlin-Rie, who had by now begun his own bloody crackdown with the onset of rollback,

All of this against the wishes of the State Department, this amounted to a collision course for MacArthur with his boss, President Truman. On September 29, 1950, Masuda Hajima writes, at around noon, Truman, Atchison, and Secretary of Defense George Marshall had lunch together at Blair House. After lunch, the dishes were cleared away, and a large map of Korea was brought in. Over the map they discussed at this highest level the details of crossing the 38th parallel and finally agreed to give General Douglas MacArthur the green light to cross the parallel northward. That afternoon, Marshall sent a telegram to MacArthur stating, quote,

We want you to feel unhampered tactically and strategically to proceed north of the 38th parallel. At 3 p.m., the three returned to the White House, attended a National Security Council meeting, and officially approved NSC-68. NSC-68 has been described as, quote-unquote, the American blueprint for waging the Cold War. It promoted the massive military buildup in the 1950s and legitimized the far more confrontational and aggressive stance toward the Soviet Union and any other communist states. state America had a problem with. What's interesting here is that it had been rejected by the president several months earlier. In other words, writes Hajimu, it would have gone nowhere had it not been for the Korean War. Here's Reginald Thompson on the fall of Seoul to United Nations troops. The despised 7th Division, filling up rapidly behind their spearhead columns,

had made a surprise crossing of the Han River a few miles to the south, and had marched swiftly to seize a strategic, thinly populated hill dominating the entire scene of action and virtually sealing the fate of soul. Troops hurried from point to point and from tank to tank, dodging the imperturbable civilians as they moved forward. But there would not be a dramatic fall of the city. Slowly and inexorably,

the last life was being squeezed and battered out of it, to the accompaniment of a hideous inferno of blast and flames. I wrote that night in my message home, This is a new kind of warfare, more terrible in its implications than anything that has gone before. The sergeant, leaping forward with his flag on his shoulder, emerged 15 minutes later high up on the Capitol building, climbing to the dome.

The North Korean flag was torn down, and the stars and stripes firmly fixed to thwart the dome. It was precisely three o'clock in the afternoon. The battle was won. In the days after the Incheon landing, the United Nations General Assembly had been in session, and newspaper headlines predicted imminent UN victory in Korea. But rather than use the appearance of total victory as diplomatic leverage,

it was apparent to I.F. Stone that the American strategy, with Harry Truman at the helm, was actually bending toward the will of those who wanted to take this war further, the hardliners, the real hardcore anti-communists. How was this happening? With a bit of a soft spot for Truman, the otherwise hard-headed Stone writes, In the 10 years from 1940 to 1950, I worked as a Washington correspondent. To me, with a slight personal acquaintance and a long professional observation to judge by,

Truman always seemed a good human being, however exasperatingly inadequate to the terrible responsibilities thrust upon him by the death of Roosevelt, and his honorable and decent a specimen of that excellent breed, the plain small-town American, as one could find anywhere in the USA. Not a man who would deliberately do any harm, but the victim of circumstances and forces stronger than himself. He did not want war, but unfortunately, and at the same time, he did not want peace, and in a sense could not afford peace.

As far as Douglas MacArthur was concerned, there was no question in his mind about what to do once his army retook Seoul and secured everything south of the parallel, advance north, cross the 38th parallel, and roll communism out of Korea altogether, kicking communist leaders back over the Yalu River into China and the Soviet Union. The Associated Press reported on September 25th that Seoul had been liberated, a week and a half after the Incheon landing took place. This wasn't true, as Halberstom points out. Hard fighting, in fact, went on until September 28th. MacArthur's race to claim Seoul ran rough over the bodies of soldiers, both Korean and American. Quote, an army officer who led the eastern flanking attack, the United Press said, attributed the city's destruction to international politics.

Quote, we had promised the Korean people that their capital would be spared. It could have been. One lieutenant colonel said, quote, a triumphal entry into the city was needed as soon as possible, and we gave it to them, but it cost us and the Koreans plenty. The New York Times reported that one army commander, quote, said the UN attack accomplished absolutely nothing of military value. Perhaps this is why the United Press reported on,

quote, the coolness of the welcome received by the Liberators. Reginald Thompson again, quote, it was an appalling inferno of din and destruction with the tearing noise of dive bombers blasting right ahead, and the livid flashes of the tank guns, the harsh, fierce crackle of blazing wooden buildings, and high-tension poles collapsing in an utter chaos of wires. Few people have suffered so terrible a liberation. Over the course of September, following the landing at Incheon, KPA forces withdrew behind the parallel, which North Korean historians call, quote, the great strategic retreat.

Reginald Thompson writes about the newly victorious General MacArthur. It was clear already that there was something profoundly disturbing about this campaign and something profoundly disturbing about its commander-in-chief. I must confess that the picture of the man as he was presented and the words he spoke filled me with nausea, and Thompson watched MacArthur give a press conference inside the crowded capital after the fall of soul. There was a hush. General MacArthur, looking curiously human, old and even pitiable without his hat, came slowly down the stairway leading a small, brown-faced, gray-studied figure by the upper arm, as a headmaster might lead a pupil.

The pupil was Singman Rhee, whose corrupt government of South Korea had made him as distasteful as Chang Keishchek, an embarrassment to the United Nations, and another awkward bedfellow of, quote, democracy, unquote. MacArthur grasped the lectern, and slowly, with tears in his eyes and voice, read his purple speech and intoned the Lord's Prayer. It was difficult to believe that this man, with the breaking voice and the voice and the thinning hair nursed his dreams of the conquest of Asia and saw himself not only as superb Mikado, but as Genghis Khan in reverse, threatening to bring down the world about our ears

if he wasn't stopped. And this British journalist watched Singman Rhee by MacArthur's side give his own speech and wax poetic about the hopes for a restored South Korea. Before the echo of these noble words of the South Korean president had died away, the prisoners had filled. Men, women, and even children, suspect or guilty, were most brutally beaten up. Soon hundreds faced the firing squads and, riddled with bullets, were heaped into common graves by their executioners. Few stayed to bear eyewitness to these horrors, for all the rest of the hopes were swiftly dispelled as the United Nations, flushed with victory, leapt forward for the kill.

Once again, by Stones read, the self-restraint of China and Russia at this point made possible an American victory. Both had complained of being struck near or even within their own borders, though neither retaliated. As he puts it, quote, anxiety increased in Washington

with the possibility of peace. September 21st, the Secretary of the Air Force spoke to the Aviation Writers Association, the opinion makers of the time on matters of planes, jets, and, of course, bombers. He talked up the $11 billion budget for more defense spending, which would balloon the Air Force's size from 48 groups to around 70. That same day, the new Secretary of Defense was sworn in, after the last one, Secretary Lewis Johnson, had peeved Truman by being too publicly hawkish. But even the new secretary,

General George Marshall, used his inaugural speech to broach the idea of universal military training, an unpopular idea that the administration nevertheless seemed to be urging all of a sudden. Then, Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told the National Press Club that, quote, the greatest danger facing the West lay in the possibility that the United States might let down its guard after victory had been won in Korea. Around this time, the State Department was proceeding with a separate treaty with Japan, that did not preclude rearmament, and announced American intentions to arm West Germany. This was done without even consulting other Western allies, who chafed the idea. And all these guys, these were the moderate elements of the U.S. regime, not the hardliners

to be found in the MacArthur camp. Now, the Soviet stance at this moment could hardly have been more different. On September 25th, Stone writes, Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Jacob Malik was asked, do you favor or will you agree to a meeting between the top leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union to negotiate their differences to help achieve full peace? The answer? Yes. Stone writes somewhat amusingly that when the U.S. tried to make this appear disingenuous by pointing out the question appeared prearranged, it should have been obvious that when a diplomat arranges to have himself asked whether his government wants peace talks so that he can say yes, he must be anxious for peace talks.

Perhaps the State Department did actually fear that the Kremlin was willing to do something to reduce the tension. On September 28th, United Nations members negotiating at Lake Success in New York voted to formally approve a maneuver north of the 38th parallel, but also cleared the path for national elections in Korea that it was acknowledged would eventually favor the communists, an outcome unacceptable to the American government. Some delegates said that, quote, it was probable that under this plan, a unified Korea would go communist within four or five years.

Shortly afterwards, on September 30th, Warren Austin, the ambassador to the UN, said, quote, at this moment we cannot foresee the precise circumstances in which unification is to be accomplished. Sending troops all the way to Korea, rolling back the People's Army, just so there could be more talk of communists winning elections, this was not a good result for an administrative that was still under attack at home for being soft on communism, especially among those braying for a final showdown with the Soviet Union and China. Truman wanted something which was neither war nor peace, writes I. F. Stone.

MacArthur wanted war. Indecision made Truman at best an irresolute superior, at worst, a passive collaborator in MacArthurism. It was easy to imagine the storm in Congress if the war had ended then in the there, with plans for unified elections, and if those elections had brought to power a government containing communists, Truman only had to imagine this to see the point of Singman-Ree's program. There was also Japan to think about. As was written at the time, quote, the Japanese, of course, have a secondary reason for hoping for a quick UN counter-invasion of North Korea. This is the prospect of greatly enhanced Japanese expiry trade should the United Nations succeed in unifying Korea

and, with American capital, undertake the enormous task of reconstruction. The heaviest industrial damage has been wrought in North Korea by Allied bombers. If the UN should succeed in unifying both sections, there would be a double market for the goods Japan hopes to sell in rebuilding Korea, and sufficient stability to ensure that orders placed and fulfilled would be paid for without possible interference by a new outbreak of civil war or revolt. In other words, the longer the war went on, the more devastation visited on North Korea, the larger the market would be for a resurgent, U.S. friendly Japan at the war's end.

On the North Korean side, documents retrieved from the KPA around this time indicate Kim's focus was making an effective withdrawal from the South. Bruce Cummings cites evidence that the KPA was planning to draw the Alibah. forces across the parallel to trap them. One KPA officer who was captured said, one may think that going down all the way to the Basan perimeter and then withdrawing all the way to the Yalu, which they will do soon, was a complete defeat. But that is not so. That was a planned withdrawal. We withdrew because we knew the UN troops would follow us up here, and they would spread their troops thinly all over the vast area. But how much of a trap could this be if the

Americans themselves knew damn well that a drive past the parallel would place UN troops against not only North Koreans again, but against the Chinese troops. New York Times correspondent Hanson Baldwin throughout September had been filing dispatches noting the likelihood of such a possibility, particularly given China's sensitivity to development projects on the Yalu River. These were critical to China's ongoing industrialization. By early October, the aperture of this conflict had widened, to include not just China, but also the Soviet Union. From a Biden White House blog, July 2021, the Korean War started in June 1950, and hostilities ceased in July 1953.

Prices had been declining in the months prior to the war because of a mild recession, but rebounded with the return to wartime status. Demand jumped as households reminded of rationing and supply shops. shortages during World War II rushed to purchase goods. In addition, some consumer production shifted back to military material and price controls were reinstated. Now, next to a story about the Allied halt at the 38th parallel in the New York Times

from September 30th, 1950, was another front page item about a different part of the Korean War, the return of price controls. Just a few weeks earlier at the beginning of September, Congress had passed the Defense Production Act, which you can think of as the printer that produced MacArthur's blank check. With inflation on the rise, the Korean War was the form of fiscal activity that the government was ramping up where the new spending was. Quote, the Korean War, like the New Deal in World War II, offered economic stimulus through growth liberalism,

or military Keynesianism, writes the historian Michael Brennis. Harry Truman, he writes, used national defense as a means toward full employment. The Defense Production Act repurposed Fair Deal language to accomplish what Truman wasn't able to do without Cold War rhetoric. Through price controls and a wartime economic mobilization thanks to Korea, Truman would be able to continue the great American economic growth engine without having to redistribute the pie. After midnight, at his dacha, Stalin received an urgent cable from Pyongyang with a panicky letter,

from Kim Il-sung and the second-ranked man in the North Korean leadership, Pakongyang. The letter informed Stalin that the U.S.-led forces had taken Seoul. The moment enemy troops crossed the 38th parallel, Kim and Pak wrote, we will desperately need immediate military assistance from the Soviet Union. If for some reason this help is not possible, then would you assist us in organizing international volunteers? volunteer units in China and other people's democracies to provide military assistance? Goncharov, Lewis, and Zhu write, it only took Stalin a few minutes to dictate a telegram

to Mao Zetung and Zhou and Lai, advising the Chinese to, quote, move immediately at least five or six divisions to the 38th parallel to shield Kim. Deliberating with Mao, Stalin wrote that the U.S., quote, was not prepared at the present time for a big war, and Japan was still incapable of rendering any military assistance to the Americans. Therefore, if the U.S. faced the threat of such a war, they would, quote, have to give in to the Chinese, backed by its Soviet ally, in the settlement of the Korean question. Stalin was very wrong here. Though those who peg his primary motive as pure realism, they speculate that he did not mind the U.S. starting a larger war either way, as long as he was able to stay out of it.

This is the view of the historians Zubak and Pleshnakov. The episode showed Stalin displaying under duress the best of his real politic side. He was willing to swallow a serious regional defeat and even the loss of a socialist regime on the Soviet borders rather than risk a military clash with UN forces. In Khrushchev's presence, Stalin once said, so what? If Kim Il-sung fails, we are not going to intervene with our troops. Let the Americans be our neighbors in the Far East. Key American officials suspected that this was Stalin's approach.

Quote, once the war started, many U.S. officials concluded the Soviet Union would stay out of the war, right Zhu, Goncharov, and Lewis. They could adduce no evidence of Soviet intentions to intervene directly on the Korean Peninsula. Near the guns, the score was against the enemy. They were losing points, losing time. There were tough decisions, but we had leaders who could make them. Now, the question of the 38th parallel comes up again. A week before MacArthur rolled into Seoul, that was back in September 21st, President Truman had said UN forces crossing the parallel was for the UN to decide.

A week later, however, Truman said he could not say publicly whether MacArthur would cross this line. Zayev Stone puts it, the word publicly in the president's reply implied that he already knew privately what MacArthur's forces would do. More than that, Truman did in fact know he had authorized MacArthur to cross the parallel. Up until this time, as we've seen, the United States had declared the 38th parallel an international boundary. That was the whole justification for invading Korea in the first place. Now, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. would call the 38th parallel a, quote, imaginary line, unquote. Apparently, it was a line that, when crossed by North Koreans, was sacrosanct.

But when crossed by America or its allies, was meaningless. On October 1st, MacArthur broadcast a proclamation to the North Korean command, with the United Nations handed a copy as an afterthought. I, it began, as the United Nations commander-in-chief, call upon you and the forces under your command in whatever part of Korea is situated, forthwith to lay down your arms and cease hostilities under such military supervisions as I may direct. According to MacArthur's proclamation, the U.S.-backed re-regime was to inherit the entire peninsula. This did not imply a good outcome for North Korean soldiers, were they to surrender the whole country.

If anything, MacArthur's proclamation gave the communists the best reason possible, to keep fighting. Stone notes that the possibilities to resolve peace in this moment were actually many. Quote, the UN could have offered to negotiate with the North Korean regime. It could have asked surrender, but on specified terms. It could have promised countrywide elections with Russian and Chinese observers invited. It could have offered a temporary UN trusteeship for the whole country with a guarantee of safety for the defeated communists in the North. All this was foreclosed by MacArthur's proclamation calling for unconditional surrender. But in fact, none of that was ever going to happen, because 15 minutes before MacArthur's

proclamation, South Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel under the direction of MacArthur and specifically the U.S. 8th Army. The American Air Force in warships covered the South Korean advance. The rest of the UN ground troops followed suit after UN approval was rammed through after the fact once again. This advance north was not because the Republic of Korea's army was engaged with North Korean troops. In fact, the New York Times reported on October 4th that up to today, it was almost a sightseeing tour for the tired South Korean soldiers who have not met any major opposition for more than 10 days. In other words, this was not a move dictated by military necessity. On October 7th, the United Nations voted to neither approve nor disapprove of crossing

of the 38th parallel by Allied forces. The United States, the preeminent power behind these kinds of UN deliberations, decided for itself that the language of previous resolutions gave it the military justification to cross the parallel, which nullified the other member states who opposed this logic. This again is quite similar to the Iraq war, when the Bush administration insisted that an invasion was fully justified under the language of previous resolutions, which no one had really intended to justify invasion. The very next day, two American fighter jets attacked a Soviet airport, just south of Vladivostok, 60 miles over the Korean border. The two planes, F-80 shooting stars, strafed the Soviet air dome with machine guns.

Here was a moment where things could have spiraled into a global war. The USSR immediately lodged a protest with the United States, whereupon the surrealist character of MacArthur's quote-unquote UN forces came up again. Though the attacking jets were American, commanded by Americans, the State Department officially refused to acknowledge the Soviet claim because it should have been addressed to the body carrying out the mission. in Korea, the United Nations. Again, MacArthur's army was both America and not America, both a UN force and not a UN force.

Furthermore, MacArthur's headquarters denied the attack even took place. The Soviets, meanwhile, were handling this quite differently. They didn't take things further after being openly mocked for their complaint. Stalin seemed to swallow the affront, I.F. Stone writes. Foreign minister Andrei Vashinsky, in fact, gave a speech pledging to meet the U.S. halfway. if it would back off this get-tuff policy. He was still tapping into the idea of post-war U.S. Soviet Union cooperation

even at this late date. Stone asks, suppose the USSR had acted differently. Suppose fighting had broken out over the air dome and spread. The United Nations would have found itself drawn toward war with the USSR through the medium of a unified command

which operated in its name but was not under its control. Let's grab a bite and get on. Here come the babies they'll need. Version tanks, rumbling up to spearhead the action to come. In early October, South Korean units rolled through the east coast of Korea. As Bruce Cummings notes, they were 25 miles above the parallel within two days. He had four divisions in the North within a week,

and they captured the eastern port city of Wansan on October 10th. After that, they kept on rolling toward the Yalu, with the North Korean Army withdrawing ahead of them. After a week of marching in the North, a South Korean major kept repeating that he couldn't understand why the North, quote, had been giving up beautiful natural defenses. One reporter commented that the North Koreans had not been fighting.

October 10th, Truman announced that he would be flying 6,000 miles west to meet General MacArthur in the Pacific, this would be their first and only face-to-face meeting ever. Harry Truman announces that he will meet personally with MacArthur and express the nation's appreciation for his great service. Never having met MacArthur before, he exudes an almost boyish delight at the prospect of meeting one of the nation's great heroes. Sunday, October 15th, Wake Island, the president and the general meet for the first time. Observer's note, MacArthur does not salute his commander-in-chief. Newsmen are not allowed inside this meeting place, and what is said will later become a matter of controversy.

October 15th, the two men met for an hour and a half. Four days later, the American ambassador to the UN submitted a note to the Security Council from MacArthur, acknowledging responsibility for the attack on the USSR, albeit naming the cause, quote, navigation error and poor judgment. The MacArthur-Truman meeting on Wake Island, a U.S. possession east of Guam, was bizarre. MacArthur only agreed to fly that far from Korea to meet the president,

and contemporaneous press reports show that journalists were surprised by the meeting and not entirely sure what it was about. Truman would later claim that MacArthur had assured him that the Chinese would not enter the Korean War. This prompted the president to give MacArthur his blessing for the incursion north, the one that MacArthur's troops were already making. The train's loaded with war where he's going back for salvage, loaded with supplies for the front. Again from Thompson's war reporting,

the Americans made their way to Pyongyang. Patrols crossing the parallel at various points reported light resistance, minor roadblocks, an occasional mortar fire. The 28th Cavalry Regiment in the center would open up the main road to the heavily defended Key Town. and communication center of Qumchan, about 20 miles north. This was the first phase in the advance against Pyongyang.

Thompson considers the northerners that were still fighting. The whole thing took on a quality of fantasy. What on earth were the handful of North Koreans thinking? There they were, with a machine gun, a rifle or two, exchanging shots with three tanks and more than 100 men, fighter bombers, and no end to it, except death. It was almost impossible not to cheer when the northerners got a light mortar going

and lobbied two shells short into the riverbed and then three on the road. The whole column was halted, a battalion. I've described this in some detail because it was typical of the whole advance and the whole method. Every enemy shot released a deluge of destruction.

Every village and township in the path of war was blotted out. In the blunt words of Bruce Cummings, quote, the Pyongyang occupation was a disgrace. An account in the times of London, quote, weeks after the fall of the city, there were no public utilities, law and order was evident only on the main streets

during the hours of daylight, and the food shortage due to indifferent transport and distribution had assumed serious proportions. The same brutal methods that the South Koreans and their American handlers had used during their summer defeats were applied in their autumn victories. This was beginning to concern the British, who noted that it was now official policy to, quote, hunt and destroy communists and collaborators, end quote. The facts confirmed what is now becoming pretty notorious, quote, namely that the restored civil administration in Korea bids fair to become an international scandal of a major kind, end quote.

The Brits begged the U.S. to take it more seriously. One missive went, quote, Dean Rusk agrees there have regrettably been many cases of atrocities, end quote, by the South Korean authorities, and promises to have American military officers seek to control the situation. Yes, internal American documents reveal the United States was well aware of the atrocities committed by the South, as they always had been.

This resulted in Americans reprimanding and sometimes even replacing ROK units, but obviously it did not stop the advance north. By November alone, South Korea said it had rounded up almost 56,000, quote, vicious red-hot collaborators and traitors, a total that Cummings suspects was probably an undercount. Still in captivity, General Dean was asked again by another North Korean commandant. Quote, why did the Americans come over here?

And again, I said, to help the people of South Korea to retain their national integrity and to protect them from aggressors from the north. Then they shot a whole series of questions at me. Why do the Americans bomb innocent women and children? Why do they bomb children while they're swimming? Why do they bomb farmers along the highways and kill their cattle? I answered all these questions by saying that Americans never knowingly harm women, children, or non-combatants. Thompson writes of MacArthur nearing Pyongyang.

It was already common knowledge that MacArthur wanted to establish himself as the Napoleon of the East before he died. It seemed to us that the old man, isolated and surrounded by fawning sycophants in his ivory tower, had become a blind, ridiculous, but immensely powerful Samson capable of pulling down the world. On October 24th, the U.S. announced that it would be respecting a, quote, buffer zone of 40 miles from the Manchurian, that is, Chinese border. This indicated the White House's desire to avoid clashes with China, which, as we've mentioned, had in fact already moved troops to protect dams just over the border in North Korea.

This the Americans knew. This MacArthur knew. Yet MacArthur defied this buffer zone, even putting out a statement defying it, defying his president, his spokespeople said simply that their job was to, quote, clear Korea, period. Not only that, McArthur's headquarters surely knew that Chinese troops had entered Korea by now and had clashed with American soldiers in Korea, but had remained silent about this. Stone puts it amusingly, quote, By that time, the contrast between what the front lines knew and what headquarters admitted

must have been so wide that if MacArthur had been a new dealer instead of a right-wing, darling, he would have been suspected of covering up for the Reds. On October 31st, headquarters finally conceded that, yes, the Chinese were, in fact, fighting in Korea. Why did it take Tokyo so long to admit it? Quote, the longer the fighting continued, Stone speculates, the harder it would be to order McArthur to disengage his troops and withdraw. That is, MacArthur downplayed the presence of Chinese troops. in order to prolong clashes with them and make a wider war even more likely.

November 1 brought evidence that the Reds now had access to fighter planes and upgraded rockets. At that moment, U.S. troops were headed to the Yalu River. Even more provocatively, they'd hit the Changjin Reservoir, exactly where Chinese troops were known to be concentrated. On November 6th, MacArthur himself was ready to admit that China had entered the war, calling it, quote, one of the most offensive acts of international lawlessness of historic record. He accused the Chinese of waging war from their, quote, privileged sanctuary. The Wei Stone phrases this move by the MacArthur forces, that is,

his attacking the Chinese troops, guarding key reservoirs over their border. It may very well be applied to the entire U.S. intervention in Korea. This was not a matter of the U.S. falling into a trap, but of the U.S. arranging one. Quote, if a trap had been laid by the Chinese communists, the way to avoid it was easy enough. Don't send American troops into those areas, which Tokyo knew contained Chinese troops.

But in the troops went all the same. The AP wrote now that the situation could become a greatly expanded version of the first days of the Korean War. That is, there would be a slow fighting retreat of the UN. back down the peninsula. This is precisely what would happen. Thank you.