Blowback - S3 Episode 8 - "American Caesar"

Episode Date: November 14, 2022

President Truman and his “Big General in the Far East” enter their final standoff over the war.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Christmas Eve 1950. American GIs were supposed to be home by now. They weren't. Instead, on this day, General Douglas MacArthur raised the stakes of the Korean War with a message to Washington, asking for permission to use nuclear weapons. to bomb the Chinese border with North Korea. Supposedly fearing a Chinese invasion below the 38th parallel, MacArthur would claim in his memoirs

that his plan had been to drop a modest number, say 30 to 50 atomic bombs. The American military command successfully got South Korean President Singhman Rhee and others to evacuate Seoul, to prepare for what I.F. Stone called, quote, a phantom battle with a phantom. pho. What was McArthur's and the military commands endgame here? Why evacuate troops from what was supposedly such a critical battle? MacArthur, like Richard Nixon, believed that what was

coming, inevitable and even necessary, was a direct confrontation with global communism. Had MacArthur gotten his wish and dropped atomic bombs, direct war with China and Russia would have been the result. In that event, I.F. Stone writes, the troops in Korea would be caught in a trap. If Manchuria was to be bombed, it would be better to get the troops out of Korea first. So in spite of the fact that less than a month earlier, President Harry Truman had explicitly declared that it was he and he alone who decided how nuclear weapons were to be used, his general in the Far East, the general in the Far East, was acting as if Americans were preparing to use nuclear weapons regardless.

Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Colwyn. And this is Season 3, Episode 8, American Caesar. Last time, we witnessed the People's Republic of China enter the Korean War after a North Korean defeat. General MacArthur's drive to the Yalu River pushed Chairman Mao to commit troops to the defense of the DPRK, despite many in the Chinese leadership breaking with him on this. The initial two phases of the Sino-Korean counterattack were immensely successful

and pushed UN forces back south of the 38th parallel altogether. This reversal spooked the Americans so much that Harry Truman not only declared a national emergency, the White House and the U.S. military began seriously planning for a nuclear solution to their Korean problem. And as the U.S. Air Force, with its complete control of the skies, continued to pummel its enemies, General Douglas MacArthur became increasingly daring in his efforts to expand this war and draw the Chinese deeper into the conflict, or perhaps to draw the U.S. into

China itself. The MacArthur faction of the U.S. government, along with its hawkish supporters such as Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, they were slowly ripping open. the split between them and the so-called moderates who wanted a Korean war, not a world war. Now, facing not only Korean but Chinese troops, the UN forces will be forced to retreat even further. But on the communist side, these astounding victories against the world's preeminent military power came at a terrible price, and it was soon clear the Sino-Korean troops needed arrests. This, Douglas MacArthur could see, he also saw the swelling numbers of prisoners

of war, POWs, who just may be able to serve their own function in the propaganda war back home. Like an echo in reverse, from the crisis in the Caribbean that was still 10 years in the future, the elected leader of the U.S. government was finding it increasingly difficult to control the elements of his government and his military that desired no. nuclear standoff to finish off communism once and for all. At the opening of each session of Congress, the president, fulfilling an obligation imposed on him by the Constitution, makes a report on the state of the Union. As we meet here today, American soldiers are fighting a bitter campaign in Korea.

Our men are fighting alongside their United Nations allies, because they know, as we do, that the aggression in Korea is a part of the attempt of the Russian communist dictatorship to take over the world step by step. The third phase of the Chinese and Korean counterattack on UN forces commenced on New Year's Eve, 51. This route pushed the American and UN forces further southward and into the new year. By January 4th, the UN forces were evacuating Seoul, the capital of South Korea. In 24 hours, they were out of Incheon, the site of MacArthur's great comeback the year before. U.S. military headquarters in Tokyo started to flood the press with statements on, quote-unquote, hordes of red Chinese.

A series of hammer blows, they said. The Seoul retreat, quote, ought to wake up the people at home like nothing else. I have Stone notes with interest how many of these generals were busy repelling supposed hordes with such a, quote, sharp eye on public opinion, almost as if they were engaged less in military actions than in gigantic advertising campaigns. This fever spread from the military to the media to the U.S. Congress. Demands were made, Stone reports, for a second front in China to be opened by Changkaishek from Formosa and for a complete withdrawal from Korea.

President Truman pushed back on this demand from the American hardliners. He was still looking to keep the bloodbath nice and neat and confined to the Korean Peninsula. And so, as planned, MacArthur's forces burned and abandoned Seoul before any enemy forces had even begun to approach. The Associated Press's reporter on the scene, flying over Incheon and Seoul, saw no sign of enemy troops. Quote, we flew over Seoul and found a dead city. Where, everyone asked, was the enemy.

MacArthur was soon forced to invent a new guiding philosophy to explain all of this, the philosophy of if. As Stone puts it, the abandonment of Seoul was not due to the weight of the attack against it, but to a calculation that if other forces, more than 55 miles away, were to take the city of, say, Wanju, and if they were to turn west, they might outflank Seoul. Now that the communists had pushed the U.S. back into South Korea,

it was clear to some that an eventual stalemate of some kind was likely. The New York Times reported that the plan was now to relive the retreat to the Busan Beachhead from the previous summer. Why? By Stone's Lights. To free the U.S. up to go after the real source of all this, the Chinese. The MacArthur camp, in an event, out of the military, were eager to pull out of Korea and to begin bombing Manchuria. With urging from the British, the supposed seat of government back in the White House tried to

crack down on this mentality. Truman fired the general in charge of the U.S. Air Force's bomber command in Korea. This general had recently piped up at a press conference with eager talk of a, quote, atomic offensive. His superior would then tell reporters, obviously he doesn't speak for the Air Force. Of course, days earlier, this general had been in charge of American bombers in Korea. MacArthur was ordered to stop this withdrawal based on the philosophy of if. Now that the supposed onslaught of Chinese Reds was receding, the U.N. side's diplomatic wing sought to take advantage in some lull in the fighting. MacArthur got to work waging slow-motion war, as Stone puts hinting darkly every few days of enemy traps which were never sprung and enemy offensives

which were never launched. Here, in MacArthur's apparent desperation to widen the war and stamp out international communism for good, Izzy Stone makes an inevitable comparison. Some 20 years earlier, Prussian military aristocrats and sophisticated Rhineland millionaires felt a similar distaste for the perhaps more vulgar but equally shrewd antics of Adel Hitler. They swallowed rapidly and went along with Hitler. And in this case, the White House and the State Department and the Pentagon, all went along with MacArthur. We must take the leadership in meeting the challenge to freedom and in helping to protect

the rights of independent nations. This country has a practical, realistic program of action for meeting this challenge. the ostensible head of the U.S. government, had said that he would not bomb communist China without approval from the United Nations. Attacked from isolationist Republicans like Robert Taft for his Eurocentric policy and attacked by Hawks for his unwillingness to use the A-bomb in Asia, the conflict in Korea was beginning to settle into a dangerous groove. Unwilling to abandon its commitment to the Republic of Korea in the South, whose brutal regime was still viewed as a necessary bulwark against communism, the U.S. was also unwilling to broaden the front of the war as some of

its generals deemed necessary. One personnel change from January 1951 in particular is worth highlighting. General Emmett O'Donnell of the Air Force, whose nickname was, by the way, Rosie, was the official in charge of the Far East bombing command. Shortly after the top brass met in mid-January 1951, the U.S. military announced that O'Donnell had been reassigned. Speaking to the New York Times before his return home, O'Donnell said that there was nothing left to bomb unless the U.S. was willing to bomb China or use the A-bomb. We have done all the major damage in Korea with the 43,000 tons we dropped. They haven't got a single refinery left. They have no chemical potential, and their transport system is completely shot, O'Donnell said,

before repeating a familiar refrain from Air Force leaders, we have never been permitted to bomb what are the real strategic targets, the enemy's real sources of supply. O'Donnell was talking about China. Upon General O'Donnell's return to the United States, the New York Times reported, while in an hour-long press conference he skirted carefully any pointed proposal that the atomic bomb be used against the Chinese communists,

he mentioned the atomic bomb several times and left no doubt that he regarded it as an integral part of United States' employable armament. In fact, O'Donnell said that the strategic bombardment strategy pursued until now had not been designed to win the war all on its own. It had in fact been designed to, quote, deliver the atomic offensive to the heart of the enemy. In other words, the commander-in-chief of the Far East, General MacArthur, had been fighting to secure a pathway for nuclear bombs on the Chinese, an apocalyptic insurance policy against the so-called hordes that were coming against the U.S. troops.

The thing is, there were no hordes. And the day after O'Donnell's press conference, according to the Times, the general was called to headquarters for an ostensible reprimand. MacArthur and the military men wanted to take the fight to a nuclear level, which they believed would allow them to widen the scope of the war in Korea. Rather than unleash Armageddonet, Harry Truman's plan for 1951 would be to channel the fury and might of American military power on North Korea, such that by the summer of 1951, General O'Donnell would testify before Congress that, quote, I would say that the entire, almost the entire Korean peninsula, insula is a mess. Everything is destroyed. There is nothing worthy of the name. In his memoirs, the Chinese general Peng de Huai writes of the third phase of the Chinese Korean counterattack. Quote, on New Year's Eve, we broke the enemy defense line, took over Seoul,

crossed the Han River, and recovered Incheon Harbor. But Peng noticed that the Americans were beginning to wise up. Quote, the enemy changed strategy, transferring additional troops. Their mechanized units were pulling back about 30 kilometers per day. It was exactly the mileage our army could move forward by foot in one night. These moves showed us that the enemy was leading us into the trap of assaulting their well-defended positions. When our army was exhausted, they would launch a frontal counter-attack, as well as conduct a flank landing so as to cut our retreat route. Pung describes the horrid conditions faced by the underarmed and outgunned communist troops. Quote, it was the middle of the cold winter. We did not have any air support and lacked

the protection of anti-aircraft artillery. Enemy airplanes raided us every day, and their long-range guns shelled us day and night. We could not move at all during the daytime. Our troops did not even have a one-day break. You can imagine how tired they were. As our transportation lines were getting longer, and longer, it became extremely difficult to get supplies to the front. By that time, our troops had lost almost half their men because of combat and non-combat losses. They badly needed a rest, and to resupply in order to be ready for the next battle. For the moment, however, the Sino-Korean gains looked positively astounding. Quote, in a matter of eight days, scholar Bin Yu writes, the volunteers had crossed the 38th parallel

and recaptured Seoul and pushed UN forces to the 37th parallel further south. The cost to achieve this, however, was high. Food supplies and ammunition were running out. The troops were exhausted. The Chinese and North Korean armies were still far, far short of the firepower that the UN forces possessed. At this point, there were 280,000 poorly supplied and very exhausted troops, Bin Yu writes, facing 230,000 well-equipped United Nations and Republic of Korea forces. Yet North Korean leader Kim Il-sung and Joseph Stalin to boot

didn't understand the sudden end of Pung de Huai's conservative third campaign. Pung was insisting his troops were weak and tired, not to mention outgunned and out-supplied, and he needed, as he said before, a serious break. He insisted on a three-to-four-month pause. It was going to be enough work to hold on to Seoul, which Peng suspected the Americans had evacuated to lure him farther south. But Mao Zetong was also thirsty for a final win.

The chairman was overseeing massive parades and celebrations back in Beijing, declaring the fall of Seoul and impending liberation of all Korea. Mao, having only months before, urged Kim to beware pushing the UN troops into the corner of the peninsula, while he now urged his commanders to make a final final. sweep down to Busan. The North Korean leadership, also eager to push on, haggled with the Chinese commanders on a shorter break than just three to four months. The comrades would settle on a two-month pause. Years later, Bin Yu writes, Chinese veterans and historians would later observe that calling it a day at this moment might have won far better gains for the communist forces

in the long term. But, would McArthur have ever let something like that really happen? In spite of the fact that Harry Truman had declared a state of emergency in December 1950 and had already shepherded through legislation meant to support wartime mobilization, popular support for the war had already dropped dramatically. In June 1950, when the war was said to have kicked off, 70% of the American public, according to Gallup, stood behind Truman's entry into the Korean Peninsula. Six months later, however, 49% of respondents told Gallup that America's entry had been a mistake, with only 41% saying it had been the right call. But the only other voices active in American policymaking were the ones pressuring Truman to do more, to ratchet up.

the heat. But at the same time, the pressure from abroad to constrain America's hand was also getting quite real, particularly from Britain. Prime Minister Clement Attlee was concerned about anything that could trigger a wider nuclear war, like, say, evacuating the Korean peninsula to institute a naval and air blockade of mainland China as a prelude to an invasion with Shanghai Sheck's forces to dislodge the communist government. The British press, as I have stone notes, had already cotton to this, as what MacArthur was really after, and condemned the exaggerated American reports coming from the front line. To reassert international credibility, America would again rely on the fig leaf of global consensus

by giving its policy the UN stamp of approval. Unfortunately for them by now, the Soviets had ended their boycott of the Security Council that used to be on behalf of Red China. The U.S. was unable to overcome the Soviet Union's veto. power on the Security Council. And the Truman administration began work behind the scenes to win support in the General Assembly, where a single country couldn't veto anything. On January 13, 1951, McArthur received an official visit from two joint chiefs in which Truman's official line was laid out in a personal letter from the president that was read aloud to the general

by instruction, with the purpose being that MacArthur not have any excuse to pretend that he had misread or misunderstood what the president was saying to him. Though Truman heaped praise on MacArthur for his, quote-unquote, splendid leadership, he told him in a roundabout way that doing something that would jeopardize peace in Western Europe or Japan would, quote, not be beneficial. According to William Manchester, MacArthur's biographer, MacArthur said to this, quote, we will do our best, but an actuality, quote, chose the interpretation which suited him. And MacArthur's interpretation happened to be pretending that things like a blockade of China, which risked direct and global war, were actually now U.S. policy.

But the final hope lies with the United Nations. At a momentous meeting at Lake Success. the red Chinese delegation from Peking hear themselves charged with every crime on the calendar of aggression by Ben C. Lim, representative of the Republic of Korea. While Mr. Lim talks,

the delegation whose hordes are threatening world peace refuse to take their seats and face their accuser. On February 1st, 1951, the United States successfully forced through the UN General Assembly, not the Security Council, a resolution

officially labeling Red China as the aggressor in the Korean War. United Nations Resolution 498, as this General Assembly's resolution was numbered, was among many factors in China's decision to boycott the United Nations for another 20 years, as it was the first time in the institution's history that it designated a quote-unquote aggressor state. On each of the boats, Russia's Jacob Malik was the only descending voice. The United States represented by Chief Delegate Warren Austin took up the debate and further accused the Chinese Reds of aggression in Korea. It is no exaggeration to say that that problem is the grievous one now confronting the world.

That problem is this. Will there be peace or war? or war in the Far East. The world awaits anxiously the answer to this question. The young Richard Nixon, who would years later make detente with China, at this moment, Nixon understood the political benefit of slamming Truman as soft on China. The week that the UN adopted the resolution officially sticking the PRC with the aggressor label, Nixon told a Pennsylvania crowd that, quote,

the UN must do more than merely brand communist China an aggressor. In fact, the freshly elected 38-year-old junior senator from California said, the UN, quote, must back up any such branding of fighting alongside U.S. troops. This kind of united action should mean cutting off all trade with communist China, including the British trade with Hong Kong. Fortunately for the moderates, General Matthew Ridgway, who had recently taken command of the Eighth Army, after his predecessor crashed into an arms carrier,

Ridgeway was achieving success on the ground in Korea in January and early February 1951. This was leading the Joint Chiefs in Washington further astray from the maximalist MacArthur and his fellow travelers like Richard Nixon. In fact, there was the creeping suspicion that MacArthur might be losing the plot. Scap had been operating this whole time from Tokyo,

and despite showing up on the ground in Korea ahead of major operations. MacArthur was increasingly detached from planning and administering the war, and the generals in Washington were becoming more aware of it. In response to the Chinese-Korean offensive in late 1950, the relationship between the U.S. military and the press began to disintegrate. MacArthur suddenly instituted a censorship regime far more severe than any known in World War II, Whereas up until then, war and diplomatic correspondence from around the world

were usually given by MacArthur's substantial freedom to report and write what they saw. The military relied primarily on the media's self-censorship. The growing unpopularity of the Korean War led to increased restrictions on all information coming from the front. Increasingly, notes historian Stephen Casey, author of selling the Korean War, quote, soldiers' letters were full of complaints about appalling conditions, lack of equipment, and the absence of a rotation policy, rotations as in tours of duty. All information from the front was now being censored and monitored. Though MacArthur and the military often had no issue at all with highlighting doom and gloom reports

when it satisfied their political objectives of escalating the war, the Pentagon and SCAP were now justifiably paranoid about morale, and while their crackdown on the press didn't have the effect of making the American public like the Korean War any better, it cut off much of the flow of information to the English-speaking world about the conflict. A United Press foreign correspondent would write that because of the censorship, quote, much of the truth about the Korean War and peace talks has been red-penciled. Information that is often of vital importance to the American people has been withheld, as well as facts which we need as ammunition in our Cold War against communism. The writer urged readers to be, quote,

particularly suspicious of all casualty counts. And America's British allies, no strangers to managing an empire, were starting to get fed up with all of MacArthur's Hollywood narratives. Quote, fairy tales from Korea, blared a headline from The Daily Mirror. And in February, while MacArthur was describing as purely academic, the thought that UN soldiers were doing anything major north of the 38th parallel, Stone writes that, quote, the strictest censorship curtain of the war

was dropped over the North Korean port city of Wonson. On February 14th, alongside a story about American GIs receiving Valentine's cards at the front, the United Press reported, citing the 8th Army headquarters, that South Korean Marines, quote, hit the Reds with an amphibious landing 130 miles

behind the lines in Northeast Korea, and 107 miles north of the north of, the 30th parallel. Two days later, the UN initiated a naval blockade of Wonson that would last for over two years. It was those first six weeks that were the most brutal. A U.S. Navy Rear Admiral at a March 29th press conference in Tokyo said that a UN Naval Task Force had been bombarding Wonson for 41 straight days and nights, which he claimed was, quote, the longest sustained naval or air bombardment of a city in history. This was a page out of the U.S. military's media playbook from World War II, where in

1945, for example, American newspapers proudly reported on Curtis LeMay's quote-unquote death list of napalm firebombing of Japanese cities that went on right up until the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Back in Korea, the Admiral, talking about one son, had more to say. In Wansan, you cannot walk the streets. You cannot sleep anywhere in the 24 hours unless it is the sleep of death. Today marks the 100th hour of the siege. It is a city of death. According to the United Press, quote, normally 35,000 Koreans live in Wanzan. The American Admiral estimated that his guns had reduced the population to quote unquote suicide groups, people living in caves to repel any allied invasion. Estimates elsewhere suggested that at least 80% of the city had been reduced

to rubble. The U.S. military, vowing to regain the upper hand in this war, was by now known all over Korea for its strategy of all-out destruction. By contrast, the London Times reported, the communist side rejected a scorched earth policy and left the countryside intact. Stone writes, quote, this contrast recalls the legend about Solomon and the two mothers who each claimed the same child. He found the true one by suggesting the child be cut in half and divided between them. Many Korean civilians were by now well and truly sick of the war, with little enthusiasm for any side's propaganda, but a New York Times correspondent on the ground reported,

quote, the Koreans saw that the communists had left their homes and schools standing in retreat, while the UN troops, fighting with much more destructive tools, left only blackened spots where towns once stood. For readers of the Wichita Beacon on March 29, 1951, that United Press item about Wansan was on the front page. But it was overshadowed by another larger piece of Cold War news. three convicted of atomic spying. Morton Sobel and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

had been found guilty by a federal jury in New York of passing American nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Though they had already been indicted following the arrest of Ethel's brother, it was perhaps now that their ordeal was really beginning. MacArthur now orders strategic supply centers in mansion. Bound to sever the enemy supply lines. But Truman's advisers warn that a U.S. attack in Manchuria would result in Russia's entering the war.

The strike is abandoned. The fighting must be limited to Korea. MacArthur bitterly resents Washington's orders. As supreme commander of the Far East, he has made his decisions virtually without civilian interference. He will openly request that the administration officials change their policies and the adopt instead his proposals. MacArthur now embarks on a perilous course almost without precedent in military history.

He publicly urges that the war be extended to the Chinese mainland. March was the month that Douglas MacArthur had decided he had had enough of Truman, the Joint Chiefs, and Washington politicians, as he referred to all of them. On March 1st, MacArthur received a cable from Washington, denying him permission to bomb power plant, in Chinese Manchuria north of the Yalu River. Six days later, at a March 7th press conference,

wire services reported that the general, quote, predicted today an inevitable military stalemate in Korea unless he gets major reinforcements and freedom to strike back at the Chinese Reds. But, MacArthur said, quote, even now, there are indications that the enemy is attempting to build up from China a new and massive offensive in Korea for the spring.

This was, of course, another MacArthur attempt to sabotage the obvious lull by casting it exclusively as a nefarious plot for the enemy to regroup for more battle. Three days later, March 10th, writes Bruce Cummings, quote, MacArthur asked for a D-Day atomic capability to retain air superiority in the Korean theater, after intelligence sources suggested the Soviets appeared ready to move air divisions to the vicinity of Korea, and put Soviet bombers into air bases in Manchuria, from which they could strike not just Korea, but also American bases in Japan. Four days later, wrote Air Force General Hoyt Vandenberg, the Secretary of the Air Force,

and the Deputy Secretary of Defense had been notified of the atomic discussions. Quote, Believe Everything Set, Vandenberg wrote. And then, Douglas MacArthur received a letter. On March 8th, Republican House Minority Leader Joe Martin wrote to MacArthur about the progress of the Cold War and said that, quote, many of us have been distressed that although the European aspects of the war have been heavily emphasized, we have been without the views of yourself as commander-in-chief of the Far Eastern Command. Martin went on to say that he supported McArthur's ambitions to bring Chiang Kai Sheck and his Chinese nationalists into the war,

quote, a second Asiatic front to relieve the pressure on our forces in Korea. As we've seen by now, what this really meant was starting a war with mainland China, sure to draw in the Soviet Union. This, in turn, would very likely put the world on a path to another World War, only a few years after the conclusion of the last one, and this one would have nukes from the beginning. Anyway, Martin invited MacArthur to reply, confidentially or otherwise. In his memoirs, MacArthur says that, quote, I have always felt duty-bound to reply frankly to every congressional inquiry into matters connected with my official responsibility.

The general didn't say, however, whether he was duty-bound to publicly declare opposition to Harry Truman, the President of the United States, whom the Commander-in-Chief of the Far Eastern Command supposedly answered to. 12 days later, March 20th, MacArthur says in his memoirs, he wrote back to the Republican congressman. Significantly, for the general who ran his headquarters like a PR shop, MacArthur did not ask Martin to keep these remarks confidential.

Here's the key part. It seems strangely difficult for some to realize that here in Asia is where the communist conspirators have elected to make their play for global conquest, and that we have joined the issue thus raised on the battlefield, that here we fight Europe's war with arms, while the diplomats there still fight with words, that if we lose the war to communism in Asia, the fall of Europe is inevitable.

Win it, and Europe most probably would avoid war and yet preserve freedom. As you point out, we must win. There is no substitute for victory. That same day, MacArthur, Manchester writes, a carefully worded statement was drawn up and sent to each of America's UN allies in Korea for approval. Secretary of State Dean Atchison, under dual pressure to both tamp things down for U.S. allies, and ramp things up for the right-wingers at home,

had begun exploring steps toward a more lasting peace in the Korean Peninsula. MacArthur learned of these maneuvers in a message from the Joint Chiefs the following day, apprising him that, quote, strong United Nations feeling persists that further diplomatic efforts towards settlement should be made before any advance with forces north of the 38th parallel. According to the Joint Chiefs, there very much was a substitute for victory, to borrow MacArthur's phrase, in that letter.

And it looked like a line on a map, once again across the waist of the Korean Peninsula. Not content with his statement of purpose to the Republicans, the General's immediate response to his own government was for, quote, no further military restrictions to be placed on his command. Four days later, on March 24th, the General went rogue. On March 24, 1951, without informing Washington, he issues his own ultimatum to Red China, surrender, or war might be unleashed against the mainland, he declared. In a statement distributed to the press, here reprinted in the New York Times,

McArthur claimed, It should be needless to say, I stand ready at any time, to confer in the field with the commander-in-chief of the enemy forces in an earnest effort to find any military means whereby the realization of the political objectives of the United Nations in Korea to which no nation may justly take exceptions might be accomplished without further bloodshed. In other words, MacArthur was going over the head of his president and his government, to announce he would personally meet with the commander of enemy

forces to hammer out his own version of a truce. This invitation to negotiations included everything but a threat to crush China. At the same time that the UN was preparing for the possibility of diplomatic outreach, McArthur had raced ahead to declare that he was prepared to discuss his own resolution with the enemy. His real purpose had been, as phrased by one of his advisors, to stop, quote, one of the most disgraceful plots in U.S. history, that is, the campaign to negotiate peace in Korea. Somehow, even when playing diplomat, MacArthur managed only to promote a wider war. Washington is stunned. Urgently, orders are once again directed to MacArthur. Under no circumstances, under no condition, must any public announcements of any kind be issued.

Atchison, after consultation with Truman, stated mildly that MacArthur had touched on political issues beyond his responsibility as a field commander, Stone notes. Neither then nor later was there any effort from Washington to revive the project of a joint statement of the UN aims in Korea. U.S. forces took this opportunity once again to cross the parallel, first, as before, with South Korean troops on the 26th of March, 1951. A few days later, the U.S. troops went in, and by April 7th, nine divisions were advancing a new, full-scale offensive against the north of Korea. But at this same moment that MacArthur had attempted to consolidate power and to drive north, he had also made a crucial mistake.

On April 5th, the crisis reaches its conclusion. In Washington, the Joint Chiefs concluded, quote, it would be perfectly obvious if it were anybody else who had made that statement MacArthur had made. He would be relieved of his command. But Douglas MacArthur was the most popular man in America, the icon of the U.S. Army, whose reputation had been burnished in the Philippines, Japan, and the South Pacific. As one advisor put it to Dean Atchison, even this new news, statement he'd put out was, quote, probably the most popular statement anyone has ever made.

Why? As historian Michael Schaller puts it, quote, the statement promised victory, peace, and a quick exit from Korea. The administration was forced to keep quiet for fear of getting on the wrong side of Mr. America. And then, on April 5th, Joe Martin read his telegram from MacArthur, to the floor of Congress, a coda to Martin's and others' recent campaign to open that second front against communist China. Congressman Joseph Martin, House Minority Leader, makes public a letter he received from Douglas MacArthur. Dated March 20th, the letter criticizes Truman's actions in Korea. It closes with these words, we must win. There is no substitute for victory. Although MacArthur privately pleaded innocence, Truman's diary showed that this incident

is what drove Truman over the edge. Quote, the big general in the Far East must be recalled. Sunday, April 8, 1951, the Joint Chiefs of Staff confer at Truman's request. Men like Omar Bradley, who have devoted their entire lives to the military, now must sit in judgment on one of their own. privately, they may wonder what they might have done in a similar situation. Truman evidently had more on his mind than just MacArthur when coming to this conclusion. Although MacArthur hadn't formally requested authorization to use atomic weapons in Korea,

the general's increasing tendency to go rogue and the hawkishness of many in the military leadership, such as the General Collins mentioned last episode, or General O'Donnell, whom we just discussed a bit earlier, the atomic firepower in America's arsenal and under the control of these men was beginning to look awfully deadly. A few months earlier, not long after his chit-chat with British Premier Clement Attlee, according to the historian Stephen Casey, quote, Dean Atchison and Senior State Department official Averill Harriman, stepped in to veto a Pentagon decision to send General Curtis LeMay on a high-profile fact-finding mission to Korea

on the basis that the Super Hawk Air Force commander had become, quote, something of Mr. Adam bomb, and his presence would, quote, excite people unduly. The same day that Harry Truman privately decided to fire Douglas MacArthur, the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, learned, quote, that the Joint Chiefs intended to request the transfer of atomic bombs to military control and their delivery to the Pacific, right, Steve Casey.

Also, they drafted orders, authorizing, MacArthur to launch air attacks against China in case of major communist escalation. In other words, while the Joint Chiefs and Truman were worried about Douglas MacArthur, they tacitly agreed with his anxiety over the lull in fighting in Korea, so much so that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Omar Bradley, urged sending atomic bombs to U.S. bases in Guam. Meanwhile, the head of the Civilian Atomic Energy Commission authorized the transfer of a-bombs to Guam and Okinawa, where they would be under the auspices, the operational control

of the Air Force's Strategic Air Command, led by none other than General Curtis bombs away LeMay. Bradley, who had pushed to send these weapons, had concealed their transfer from MacArthur, fearing that the general might make a premature decision in carrying it out. The Joint Chiefs of Staff favor the immediate removal of Douglas MacArthur from his command. It was only a few days after the Joint Chiefs issued their recommendation to Truman to retire MacArthur. They had learned that the president felt the same way. And that same day, the head of the atomic enemy, Energy Commission told Congress that Curtis LeMay would now have control of the nukes.

The administration and the Joint Chiefs had decided, once and for all, to fire Douglas MacArthur. They had hoped that this maneuver, transferring the nukes from civilian control to Curtis LeMay's, would soften the blow of MacArthur's firing among the Republican opposition. That did not work. Monday morning, Truman meets with his advisors. It is the moment of decision. warn that MacArthur's prestige is so great, relieving him might set off a dangerous explosion of public outrage, and it might seriously undermine the nation's faith in the office of president.

The officer in Tokyo, who was supposed to transmit the order to resign to MacArthur, did not get the message. Meanwhile, a Chicago Tribune reporter had been inquiring about a supposedly major resignation in the works. And at 1 a.m., Washington time, on April 11th, Truman's press secretary called a briefing and informed reporters of the president's decision to fire General Douglas MacArthur, whose command in Korea would be overtaken by his field commander, Matthew Ridgway. How did MacArthur hear about his firing? From his wife, who whispered the news to him as the general hosted a visiting senator for lunch. Although Truman and the Pentagon supposedly hadn't been able to reach MacArthur directly during all this time, somebody else did.

former President Herbert Hoover. Hoover, who had once run against FDR and the New Deal, had emerged in the post-war era as an anti-communist hardliner who supported the Nixon wing in their hunt for domestic communists, even sparring with the prestigious party favorite, Dwight Eisenhower, on how to sabotage communist gains in Europe. Now, in the moment of MacArthur's downfall, Hoover was on the line. Here's William Manchester.

Hoover had heard about what had happened, and talked to several Republican leaders. They wanted MacArthur to come, quote, straight home quickly as possible before Truman and Marshall and their crowd of propagandists can smear you, end quote. Details would follow in a few hours. MacArthur had once tried his hand

in the Republican presidential primary of 1948, exiting after a stunning defeat in Wisconsin. But now, Herbert Hoover was on the line, offering Caesar his crown. Doug's Next Adventure To the average American at home Douglas MacArthur may have been the protagonist in the war

he was the far eastern general he had seen and done it all and as the many parades in his honor attested he was incredibly popular but his war, the American war in Korea what had started as a police action in the words of Harry Truman that war only seemed to be getting more and more unpopular.

There were a lot of reasons for the unpopularity of the war. MacArthur's doom and gloom predictions, in spite of the stabilization of the front near the 38th parallel, had a lot to do with that. So did rising costs at home, which the Truman administration sought to manage in late 1950 with price controls and a wartime mobilization of the economy. But there was another reason that the Korean War had become so unpopular.

In the words of historian Monica Kim, author of the 2019 book The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War, quote, during the Korean War, the Prisoner of War, emerged to eclipse the citizen soldier as the dominant military figure in the American public's imagination. Over the course of the war, 4,428 U.S. prisoners were repatriated from Chinese and North Korean camps during the war. A novel phenomenon for the American public, as the American presence in Korea became less glorious, the POW label would carry different, but still tremendous, political weight. Of these repatriates, Kim writes, 88% of them had been captured in the first year of the war,

from July 1950 to July 1951, which meant that the majority of U.S. POWs had been living in the Chinese and North Korean POW camps for almost three years, with some of them undergoing interrogation repeatedly. The prisoner of war, to be clear, was not a majority American phenomenon by any means. Before the Incheon landing, at the end of August 1950, the U.S. had 1,745 Korean POWs in custody. End of September 1950, 10,800. October, 62,000. November, 98,000. And by the end of December, 1950, 137,118 Korean POWs. The conditions in the UN camps themselves, of course, were brutal, compounded by their rapid

crowding in a span of just a few months. Acute or chronic infectious diseases, such as malaria, typhus, smallpox, typhoid, diphtheria, dysentery, disintry, and tuberculosis were highly prevalent in Korea during the Korean War, concluded a South Korean medical study published in 2013. And many POWs would have been exposed to these diseases prior to entering into the camps. Of the 7,614 recorded POW deaths in the camps, 66% were due to infectious disease. Tuberculosis and dysentery were the biggest killers.

75% died between August 1950 and June 19. including 600 who died each month during the winter dysentery epidemic of 1950 to 1951. North Korean and Chinese prisoners of war held on the Korean mainland, and at the UN command at Busan were moved by the hundreds of thousands to the largest UN POW camp, built in part by the forced labor of the prisoners themselves in January 1951 at Koje Island. The island had been designated by the U.S. military as a left-end, territory, because the peasants who lived there supported land reform and were allegedly

communist sympathizers. Kojay's camp was by far the largest constructed in the war, filled with 170,000 people, including prisoners, soldiers, and other staff and civilian workers, about the size of Youngston, Ohio, or Wichita, Kansas at that time. The state of emergency, that Truman had declared in mid-December 1950 wasn't just a way of communicating to the American people, how worried he was that the Chinese had jumped into the war, as he had said, quote-unquote, with both feet. It was, as Monica Kim and other historians argue, a maneuver

that allowed the American administration to deal with a whole new political reality that it hadn't prepared for. Under the normal rules of war, for example, POWs in camps held rank and elected one another for representation. But at one camp, some Korean prisoners of war staged a protest over the red uniforms they were assigned to wear to make it more difficult for them to escape. A group of protesters stripped naked and threw off the uniforms, wrapping them around rocks and throwing them over a fence. These red uniforms were viewed as a humiliation, specifically because they echoed the dark times of Japanese colonialism. Back then, quote, prisoners who were sentenced to death were assigned the red-colored uniforms in prison. In suppressing the protests record show,

UN guards killed three POWs and injured four in an incident U.S. military investigators deemed, quote-unquote, justified. The actual interrogations and debriefing of the Korean prisoners were often unsuccessful for a host of reasons. In addition to the irregular uniforms, language barriers, and chronic understaffing, many Korean civilians from both sides of the 38th parallel ended up in POW can. camps. Some had been forcibly conscripted by the KPA, others were ROK defectors, and others were hapless civilians simply caught up in the conflict. In his distinguished army career, General MacArthur has known defeat as well as victory. Now he is stripped of his commands, and the president says why. I have therefore considered it essential

to relieve General MacArthur so that there would be no doubt. confusion as to the real purpose and aim of our policy. It is the deepest personal regret that I found myself compelled to take this action. Three months after the Kojee Prisoner Camp was launched in early April 51, American morale took a blow with the firing of Douglas MacArthur. Within days of that firing, the Truman administration created the psychological strategy board, or the PSB, the purpose of which, in the words of its first director, was to, quote, combine with the force of military and economic strength

in the free world, a systematic U.S. psychological effort under a single strategy. This was about the so-called power of ideas. In previous wars, repatriation of prisoners of war was a complicated but hardly uncommon part of negotiating a peace with the enemy.

But everyone from Dean Acheson to Douglas MacArthur agreed, the communist enemy warped the minds of its political subjects, blinding them to the harsh realities of Soviet Eastern totalitarianism, and leading them astray from the vast opportunities of Western capitalist freedoms. After MacArthur's firing in April 1951 and the unsuccessful peace talks that we'll get into next time, the question of what to do with Korean POWs only grew more critical. The PSB, America's new interagency psychological warfare coordinating bureau, argued for a policy of, quote-unquote, voluntary repatriation, a policy that in practice would mark a departure from the Geneva Convention standard of sending POWs back to their country of origin, which in the case of the Korean Peninsula was a highly political subject for the Americans. This is how Monica Kim puts it, quote, the PSB's voluntary repatriation proposal had as its main concern the continuing de-recognition of North Korea as a sovereign state, where the individual would renounce the state's sovereign claims over him or herself.

The onus, in other words, would be on the POW to choose freedom or communism, necessarily making the people who are not supposed to be political actors in war, prisoners of war, into exactly that. This was not an easy, organic, or necessarily successful project. There were 102 recorded incidents or cases in the first year of Kojah Island's operation, 28 of which involved POW injuries or death. Only a small fraction of those incidents involved actual communists, and the records show that non-communist prisoners and guards were responsible for a large number of provocations, including a POW parade between camp compounds led by ROK-UN flags that ended in Bedlam. At Koj in particular, by the middle of 1952, conditions and tensions deteriorated, eventually prompting a massive reprisal from the prisoners.

But that will come later. Meanwhile, what was happening with the American POWs? Let us review once again the weaknesses in the American character. The average American can't or won't think independently. He seems to lack confidence in his ability to solve his own problem. He is frightened and insecure. He expects others to make living live fully for himself. If the American is not committed to a hazy standard of what he is an opportunist.

Not flattering, certainly. These are communist ideas from actual Chinese documents. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Ronald Reagan. I'm speaking to you now, not as an actor endeavoring to entertain. you and certainly not as an announcer speaking for a sponsor. I talk as Ronald Reagan, American citizen, to you American citizen, concerning the communist Chinese appraisal of our national character. Did they have our number? Was it all enemy tripe? We began to learn the answer when the communist released back to us the several thousand men they had held for nearly three years.

Once the Korean War was over, Ronald Reagan would narrate a documentary that sought to tell a story about the kind of experiences that Americans had had in their own POW camps with North Korean and Chinese interrogators. This was typical of many of the American POW camps in North Korea. No barbed wire, no watchtowers, none of the precautionary measures normally taken to prevent escape. But it was after the first few months that we began to see the communist Chinese indoctrination. While American interrogators of Korean POWs had few language skills and relied heavily on Japanese colleagues, colleagues, much to the resentment of the people whom they were interrogating, the Americans were interrogated, often by people with strong English skills.

The application by the Chinese of a finely developed educational program, one that occupied every day, all day, seven days a week, for the great majority of prisoners. It was a classical anti-capitalist, anti-American diatribe of the sort the communists have been publishing for years. Here's Monica Kim. Another cast of characters not usually present in the stories of the world. come to the four. Sons of working families in factories on the railroads or oil fields were in the North Korean and Chinese run POW camps. The young men were from places like Puerto Rico, the Philippines,

and the states of Louisiana, Ohio, and Texas. They were children of immigrant families, such as Japanese, Italian, or German, and they were children during the Great Depression. In the interrogation rooms, the North Korean interrogators were fluent and at ease in English. A number of them having attended college in the US, and they were eager to talk with POWs from working class and racial minority backgrounds. These working class kids, minorities, farm boys described by Monica Kim, you can see in the Reagan documentary how there was an effort to describe these soldiers as rubs, weak-willed and easily manipulated by communists' intent on luring them into their global conspiracy. Then there were the public confessions where each prisoner was

required to stand up and perform an exercise of public self-criticism. They simply went along. They did what others expected them to do, even though they knew it was wrong. Why? These days, it's hard to imagine anybody, let alone or Ronald Reagan, describing American GIs in this way. Becoming and remaining in favor with the Chinese included informing on fellow prisoners, telling about bad attitudes and reactionary remarks.

But it really didn't mean much, because, after all, the man informed upon was never punished. Not actually. He had only to confess his crime to a sympathetic camp instructor, write an essay promising never to repeat his crime against society, and sign it. That's all. Now, what harm is there in this?

The man informed upon wasn't really furious at the man who'd informed on him. He didn't go back to camp and try to kill him or beat him up. It's worth noting as well that South Korean paramilitary groups formed in northern POW camps and presumably white American prisoners of war, formed what Kim calls KKK similar groups, like

the quote-unquote circle, which got its name from an incident in which its members surrounded and beat a prisoner who they discovered had written pro-communist articles. So then, there is this idea of brainwashing, that there

was some Sino-Soviet mind manipulation that subverted the clean consciences and strong morals of American GIs in Korea and potentially masses of millions around the world. And here's what makes all this so very hard to believe. Normally, men having faced dangers together tend to align themselves with one another on the basis of rather meaningful and intense emotional alliances. They develop a tie, a close bond. Here were men come home from captivity, having shared a terrible experience, great anxiety, and hardships for two and a half to three years. Yet we saw these men come home to us strangers to one another. Suddenly while you're

asleep, they'll absorb your minds, your memories. I don't want any partner. You're forgetting something, Miles. What's that? You have no choice. Taking literally the idea that there was a global communist conspiracy. Researchers and spooks from the nascent CIA to the military's G2 unit were now exploring how the mind might be controlled, or fear, they said, that it was what the enemy was doing. From city to city an incredible hysterical panic spread. As the unimaginable becomes real, the impossible becomes true. Stop and listen. Stop and listen me. Listen to me. Listen to me. Can't you see everyone? They're here already.

You're next. The search for the Manchurian candidate, published by the journalist John Marks in 1979, was among the first explorations of the world of M.K. Ultra, the top secret CIA research program into mind control, hypnosis, and lethal chemistry. M.K. Ultra, itself formally created in 1953, was the successor to a fairly long list of programs with codenames like Artichoke and Bluebird.

Touching on an event that we mentioned last season, right-wing revolt in Communist Hungary. John Marx writes that, quote, The behavior control program did not really get going until the Hungarian government put Cardinal Joseph Menzenti on trial in 1949. Now, despite concluding, in 1956 that, quote, there is no reason to believe that any new esoteric or unknown method

was used in handling the right-wing priest, the CIA initially believed that the communists had placed Minzenti under the influence of, quote, some unknown force. So, the agency's director approved the top secret Operation Bluebird on April 20, 1950, with the explicit, if vaguely defined intention to carry out experiments in mind control and manipulation. Bluebird flew international not long after hatching, writes John Marks. Three months after the director approved Bluebird, the first team traveled to Japan to try out behavioral techniques on human subjects, probably suspected double agents. The three men arrived in Tokyo in July 1950, about a month after the start of the Korean

war. No one needed to impress upon them the importance of their mission. Then, around October 1950, the Bluebird team used quote-unquote advanced techniques on 25 subjects, apparently North Korean prisoners of war. On September 24, 1950, days after MacArthur had staged the Incheon landing, the Sunday edition of the Miami Daily News published a page two exclusive by Hong Kong correspondent Edward Hunter, that changed the American lexicon forever. Brainwashing tactics forced Chinese into ranks of Communist Party.

From that article, quote, brainwashing is the principal activity on the Chinese mainland nowadays. Unrevealed thousands of men and women are having their brains, quote unquote, washed. They range from college students to instructors and professors, army officers and municipal officials to reporters and printers, from criminals to church deacons. Hunter's column at the time was debuting a series that described the social physics of life in communist China,

but it was this first piece on brainwashing that really caught the public's attention. And while Hunter was ostensibly an independent newspaper man, he had previously served in the OSS during World War II, and had also performed work on behalf of the CIA after the agency's founding in 1947. Hunter's article doesn't really describe a specific set of practices, so much as he presents as coordinated and self-evident, that communist regimes were converting people into communists through nefarious schemes.

These schemes, according to Hunter, included property expropriations, a la Republican allegations of buying votes with welfare, but they also had a kind of social pedagogical component and called these processes names like Democratic Discussion and Learning. Describing an encounter with an old friend of his who had just come back from the mainland, Hunter was told that he himself, quote,

would be a hard man for brain reform because of his, quote, bourgeois conceptions. And when the quote unquote brain reform or brainwashing process was more prolonged and more intensive, well, the Chinese called that brain-changing. Of this, Hunter observed that the Chinese, quote, haven't yet found out what real brain-changing is, although some have heard of Cardinal Minzenti. I noticed the first time that four of the wing bombs, the second time two of the wing bombs, had no fuses. Therefore, they couldn't be ordinary bombs. The germ bonds that we dropped on

January 4th and the 11th corresponded exactly to one of those mentioned by Mr. Ashford just two weeks previously. Also in discussions with the other pilots and navigators in the room where I live, I found that several of them had also been given special missions, and that the briefing officer told him that these Dutch were, in fact, germ bombs. What you just heard was an excerpt of a propaganda reel produced in North Korea, depicting, according to the on-screen subtitle, a captured U.S. spy. This pilot, who had been shot down in 1952, was confessing not long after that he had been deploying biological and germ warfare.

Chinese, Soviets, and Koreans were familiar with these kinds of weapons, having fought against the Japanese Imperial Army and its Unit 731, led by Shiro Ishi. As discussed earlier in this season, part of the reabsorption of Japan into the political and economic zone of the West included the American exfiltration of Ishi and hundreds of his associates, part of an effort to learn more about Unit 731's grisly experiments. on humans and with biological and germ-based weapons. While the CIA fixated on the case of the allegedly drugged Hungarian Cardinal in 1949, that same year the Soviet Union held the Kabarovsk trials of 12 Japanese officials

charged with illegal bio-warfare. A New Year's Day 1950 Associated Press story notes that the Soviet prosecutor had said, quote, three learned Japanese bacteriologists, Shiroishi, Ketano, and, Wakamatsu, who should be in the defendant's dock, were sheltering in Tokyo, quote, under the reactionary wing of those reactionary forces of the imperialist camp, which themselves dream of the time when they will be able to hurl atom bombs and lethal bacteria against humanity. By the end of that calendar year, perhaps the reactionary wing of the reactionaries had gotten their wish.

At a May 8, 1951 press conference, North Korea's foreign minister, Bakongyang, made the first public accusation against the United States of using biological weapons, saying that they had been used in a four-week period between December 1950 and January, 1951. He told us that our two outboard wing bombs were germ bombs. We dropped at Guangzhou at a maximum altitude of 500 feet and a maximum air speed of 200 miles. crowd in the moment the U.S. was facing defeat on the Korean peninsula and as your listeners know the United States does not like to be defeated you know they'll do anything they'll drop an atomic weapon on a defenseless city if that's necessary

and they will, I contend, use biological weapons. The writer, researcher, and sculptor Thomas Powell has in recent years published articles on the Korean War, biological warfare, and prisoners of war. Of these germ warfare allegations, he writes, the actions described took place during a critical juncture of the war. Quote, in this battlefield scenario, disease-infected chicken feathers were spread as a defensive tactic to cover the retreating UN forces

and slow down the Chinese volunteers advance. Chicken feathers as a vector for containing diseases was invented by Isichiro, you know? This was his pet invention. This is what he figured out, that this is a magnificent medium in which to hide diseases. And so what happened in retreat was that there were these U.S. Special Service and military police supervising a group of people dressed in Parca's protective gear that were pulling handfuls of feathers out of large canisters and running into homes of villagers and scattering and spreading these chicken feathers on the floor of their homes. and that this occurred, not in this one place, but in several places where American soldiers had previously been, that smallpox broke out after about two weeks after the Americans had retreated, and the villagers had come back into reoccupy their homes, cleaned them out, and became infected. And so there was this epidemic that involved about 3,500 cases of smallpox infection with a 10% mortality rate. And this was reported in the international press.

And this is what Pa Kong Yong, the foreign minister of North Korea, had announced in May of 1951. The biological weapons deployed against the Chinese and North Koreans was not alleged to have been a one-off event. British journalists later reported that the, quote, Tainted Chicken Feather tactic had been one used previously by the Japanese unit 731. The Australian journalist, Wilfred Burchett, distinguished for having been the first Westerner to report from atomic bomb blasted Hiroshima, reported that the following also took place in December 1950. Quote, when the Americans retreated from North Korea that December,

the North Korean Ministry of Public Health announced that the Americans had infected four cities with smallpox, another disease previously unknown in Korea. In each case, six or seven days after American troops withdrew. The incubation period for smallpox is 10 days and the bacteria must have been spread a few days before withdrawal. The bacteria were found to be of artificial culture, and in this case less virulent than the natural variety. The four cities are widely separated, but the epidemics broke out simultaneously and no other centers were affected. The cities were not connected by the retreat route. That is to say, troops withdrawing from Chongjin did not pass through Pyongyang, Yongduk, or Kuwan, or vice versa. So the epidemic, even if it started

naturally, could not have been transmitted by the troops. And in any case, there were no outbreaks in intermediate towns or villages. And in March 1951, as Powell notes, there was the bizarre case to consider of General Crawford Sams who, quote, personally conducts, one strange mission behind enemy lines with the stated intent to kidnap a North Korean People's Army plague victim from a hospital bed. Sam's commanded the naval vessel, U.S. Infantry Landingcraft No. 1091, which Newsweek dubbed the, quote, bubonic plague ship that was on a quote-unquote secret mission at Wansan Harbor in North Korea. Though General MacArthur reportedly signed off on the mission,

Sam's denied that they ended up kidnapping anybody. Thomas Powell, the writer who we've been citing just now, his father, the journalist John Powell, was prosecuted by the federal government in the 1950s for reporting, among other details, that, quote, although masquerading as an epidemic control ship, Sam's vessel was actually loaded with bacteriological installations and was used for testing germ weapons on North Korean and Chinese prisoners.

The most famous allegations of biological weapons use, however, do not come from American or Australian journalists. They came out the mouths of two English-speaking American pilots, broadcast over Beijing Radio in May 1952. Newspapers across the world carried the story, which the American government flatly denied, having maintained in the decades since that these were forced confessions

fabricated to pressure America and the United Nations into some kind of false peace. These were high-ranking officers who, as Thomas Powell notes, were able to speak clearly and convincingly about their activities. The technical details revealed in the confessions,

Powell writes, describing the mechanisms of BW bombs, the bomb-loading protocol, and the pre-flight briefings are not made-up material, but are factual eyewitness accounts of the state-of-the-art delivery systems of germ warfare in 1952. The details of their payload, pre-flight briefings, and the pilot's individual knowledge, including sortie dates and names of briefing officers, precludes the possibility of invented information.

Psychologist and writer Jeffrey Kay contends that the allegations of U.S. germ warfare are convincing, even if all of the evidence has yet to be attained. Some of the U.S. propaganda against these confessions, you know, said, well, they were, you know, they were outrageous. They, you know, quoted a few people who used, you know, communist slogans. Oh, you can see that they were dictated to say that. But only a handful of these people used such terminology. Most of them never used anything like that. What I didn't see, of course, was anyone who said, yeah, we used it and I'm glad we did. and I'm just sorry that I was made a prisoner.

I mean, if anyone thought that way, they probably thought it was not politic to say it. Now, three months earlier, the North Korean foreign minister had called for an international inquiry into the situation, but being at war with United Nations forces meant that he had to make due with an independently selected group,

assembled by communist and called the Independent Scientific Commission, or ISC. The ISC was led by the respected and famous British scientist Joseph Needham, and in the fall of 1952, its members issued a unanimous report, endorsing the allegations of biological warfare used by the United States.

Needham had previously tried to tell the West about biological weapons usage, having coincidentally in 1942, been in the Chinese city of Chongqing and seen a press conference announcing a Japanese aerial plague attack. When he cabled official, in the UK about it, the journalist Daniel Barronblatt reports, he was, quote, received skeptically

by leading biological warfare officials back home. Although the U.S. succeeded in plausibly denying these allegations, Needham's report, according to Barronblatt, showed that the delivery systems that the ISC studied, quote, were identical to methods confirmed to have been used by the Japanese against China, as was revealed in the testimony at the Khabarovsk trial by the Soviet. it's in 1949. And how did the U.S. succeed with plausibly denying this evidence and more? Last season, we mentioned the time that prior to the implementation of the Freedom of Information Act in 1974, the Joint Chiefs of Staff conveniently lost several decades' worth

of meeting minutes. Without a paper trail, bills of lading, flight logs, budgets, and so on, it's difficult to develop a portrait of what biological warfare looked like operationally. But the United States government did not even try to falsify the actual argument of the Chinese or the North Koreans. The U.S. pirouetted, both denying that it had used germ warfare and explaining that it was a communist trick that had gotten the allegations out there in the first place. And perhaps it's just one of those things, but in the case of the American pilots, We find another character from seasons past, Dr. Lewis Jolly West. Lewis West, Jolly West, who worked for the Air Force, and then later became a famous psychiatrist at UCLA,

was the guy who examined Jack Ruby and Petty Hurst. You know, he early in his career was involved in the assessment of the flyers who were returned. All these M.K. Ultra people were involved. And the debriefing, supposedly, we used to call it, or the evaluation of the return flyers. And they all ultimately were returned to the United States. But most of them in September of 1953, and they were, you know, I kept isolated from other people in the military. They were brought back slowly via ship to the United States, where they were interviewed and interrogated, if you will, by members of the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps, and then later by other intelligence entities within the different services.

and also by the CIA. Brainwashing mania solved a few problems for the U.S. and U.N. forces. For the 21 American soldiers who, at the end of the war, chose to stay behind in Korea, the American public now had a convenient explanation.

The public also now understood the reason for the war. widespread aggressive American propaganda effort. All of this was necessary to counter this advanced new communist mind manipulation. The Cold War was to go on, not only to prevent the communists from taking over Korea, but to prevent them from taking over your mind. The more important lesson reaches far beyond the camp in North Korea. The communists found some support for their charge that we're pasted, uncommitted to a definite system, sometimes opportunistic, self-seeking.

The hard test of durability of our traditions and belief, though cruelly condensed in Korea POW camps, for an unfortunate few, continues today. test can be failed when men vote uninformed or don't vote at all. The tests will predictably be failed by children so blessed that they have not been seriously and repeatedly challenged, have been promoted in school, though failing, out of fear that failure will hurt them emotionally, have been spared hard work. Communism is designed to control human beings through coercion, cutting off information, isolate the individuals, submerge in the mass, encourage conformity and passive uncritical acceptance of authority. All this we saw in

communist handling of prisons. Communism has been a singularly successful tyranny so far as it has engulfed more than a third of mankind. Those who seek more and more relief from government solve the problems of life. They constitute the true fallout, the moral fallout, against which free men must forever give battle if our freedom and its manifold blessings are to endure. The ultimate weapon for this battle is the mind, the heart, the spirit of free men. This is a lesson we must learn.

Thank you.