Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

There can be little doubt that the United States, along with the rest of the “world, underestimated the almost insanely aggressive nature of Red China. From 1949 onward, this newly established regime tried to bite every friendly hand which tried to lead it into the community of established nations. It made it perfectly clear to all its neighbors in Asia that its policies would be based on hatred for any country which did not break with the United States and line up with the Soviet Union. Even India, which leaned over backward to be friendly, was upbraided almost daily in extravagant insults of which one of the more moderate was a charge that Nehru was “the running dog of British-American imperialists.” When Great Britain offered diplomatic recognition in January 1950, it was rebuffed.

Nor was this aggressive behavior only verbal. In spite of the devastation and economic dislocation of the Civil War, Red Chinese plans for aggression continued. The general level of Chinese production in 1949 was about half what it had been in 1942, and the country clearly needed an interval to recuperate, but the budget for 1950 allotted 40 percent of its funds for the armed services, imposed a tax of 20 percent on peasant agricultural incomes, and anticipated a deficit of nearly 20 percent to be covered by printing paper money. Its declared immediate plans included the conquest of Hainan Island, Formosa, and Tibet. Hainan ‘was conquered in April 1950, and the buildup against Formosa continued for at least two months more. About 20,000 Koreans in the Chinese forces were detached and returned to North Korea, where they joined the armed forces of the People’s Republic of Korea (PRK, that is, North Korea Communist Republic). This may have been done at Russia’s request.

On June 25, 1950, after a two-hour artillery bombardment, 60,000 North Koreans, led by a hundred Soviet tanks, crossed the 38th parallel and flung themselves on 90,000 lightly armed and already disspirited South Korean troops. The latter, lacking tanks, planes, or heavy artillery, reeled backward to the south and did not stop until August 6th, when they finally made a stand before Pusan in the southeast corner of the Korean Peninsula. In this retreat the ROK troops suffered 50,000 casualties in the first month.

For forty-eight hours after the Korean attack, the world hesitated, awaiting America’s reaction. On June 26, 1950, the fifth birthday of the United Nations, many feared a “Munich,” leading to the collapse of the whole United Nations security system at its first major challenge. Truman’s reaction, however, was decisive. He immediately committed American air and sea forces in the area south of 380, and demanded a UN condemnation of the aggression. Thus, for the first time in history, a world organization voted to use collective force to stop armed aggression. This was possible because the North Korean attack occurred at a time when the Soviet delegation was absent from the United Nations Security Council, boycotting it in protest at the presence of the delegation from Nationalist China. Accordingly, the much-used Soviet veto was unavailable. On June 27, 1950, the Security Council, with Yugoslavia casting the only opposing vote, condemned the aggression and asked its members to give assistance to South Korea. On the same day President Truman ordered American forces into action and sent the United States Seventh Fleet to neutralize the Formosa Strait, where the Red Chinese armies were still poised for their invasion of Formosa. This rapid response won general approval within the United States, even from those who later condemned and opposed it. One of these was Senator Taft, who prefaced his temporary approval by charging that all the troubles in the Far East arose from the Democrats’ “sympathetic acceptance of Communism” and that the North Korean attack was in response to the invitation contained in Acheson’s speech of January 12th: “Is it any wonder that the Korean Communists took us at the word given by the Secretary of State?” He demanded Acheson’s immediate resignation, a cry which continued, almost uninterruptedly, over the next two and a half years.

The President’s order for ground forces to rescue the South Koreans was not easy to carry out. Air-force success in its budget struggles with the other services and the general budget cutting by the Republican Eightieth Congress (January 1947-January 1949) had left the ground forces with only ten army and two Marine Corps divisions, all seriously undermanned. The four occupation divisions in the Far East, which had to respond to the Korean attack, had a total of only 25 infantry battalions, instead of the 36 allotted. These, and other units, had to be brought up to strength by calling up reservists. Nevertheless, one division from Japan reached Korea by July 9th, a second by July 12th, and a third on July 18th.

The intervention of American forces in Korea was undoubtedly a great shock to the Communists, especially as the North Korean attack was a Soviet operation, while the American landing directly threatened the security of Red China. Coordination between the two Communist Powers was far from perfect and was certainly slow. The Red Chinese had no desire to see American forces reestablished on the Asiastic mainland or in occupation of all Korea up to the Chinese boundary along the Yalu River; on the other hand, they had no desire to get into a war with the United States to prevent this undesired consequence of what was really a Moscow operation, especially as Soviet support was very remote, at the farther end of a long single-track railway across Siberia. Nevertheless, the Red Chinese suspended their attack on Formosa and, in the course of July, assembled several hundred thousand troops in northeast China, considerably withdrawn from the Yalu.

For weeks the successful advance of the North Koreans gave the Chinese hope that they need do nothing. The South Koreans were quickly hurled down to the southeastern corner of the country at Pusan, and for several weeks were on the verge of being pushed into the sea. Their line held, however, and American forces began to assemble in the protected beachhead.

The United States was as eager as the Chinese to avoid a direct clash between the two countries, because such a clash could easily build up into a major war in the Far East, leaving Russia free to do its will in Europe. Washington was fearful that Chiang Kai-shek, since he could not reconquer China himself and hoped America would do it for him, might seek to precipitate such a war by making an attack from Formosa on mainland China. There was also a strong chance that MacArthur might encourage or allow Chiang to do so because that haughty general agreed with Chiang that Europe was of no importance and that the Far East should be the primary, almost the only, area of operations for American foreign policy. He had bitterly opposed the “Germany First” strategy throughout World War II and had begrudged men or supplies sent there on the grounds that these diversions delayed his triumphant return to the Philippines. As the war drew to its close, he had said: “Europe is a dying system. It is worn out and run down and will become an economic and industrial hegemony of Soviet Russia.… The lands touching the Pacific with their billions of inhabitants will determine the course of history for the next ten thousand years.”

These views were shared by the Right-wing isolationist groups of the Republican Party with whom MacArthur had been in close touch for much of his life and to whom he owed some of his success. In American politics these groups had power to do considerable damage because of their influence on the Republican congressional party and the fact that the bipartisan foreign policy under Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, which operated elsewhere in the world, did not exist in regard to the Far East. The danger of any Chiang-MacArthur cooperation to build the Korean action up into a major war was intensified by the fact that this would be opposed by the United Nations and by our allies, neither of whom was considered important by the neo-isolationists or by MacArthur, but whom the Truman Administration refused to alienate unnecessarily because they were essential, as bases, in the containment of Russia.