The U.N. refused to impose sanctions or other punitive measures against the Communist Chinese.
The United States, facing at the time a very poor tactical situation in Korea, finding the U.N. action backed by each of its European allies, had begun to explore the means of ending the fighting that brought Truman into conflict with MacArthur.
But while the Western world was willing to talk peace, and from this time continuously put forth feelers to the Communist bloc, the Red Chinese still hoped for a favorable decision on the battlefield. When they would hint of terms at all, these included withdrawal of all foreign troops from Korea, leaving North and South to settle their own affairs, withdrawal of U.S. protection to Taiwan, and admission of Red China to the U.N., all of which were strategically and politically impossible for the United States.
Here the matter rested during March, April, and early May, while a violent war of maneuver flowed up and down the middle part of the Korean peninsula. Encouraged by their success in the North, the CCF briefly engaged in open battle with the U.N. forces, in one massive assault after another, in February, April, and again in May.
Each time the CCF were spectacularly unsuccessful.
At the end of May 1951, the CCF had proved they could not prevail in open warfare in the more maneuverable ground of southern and middle Korea. But the U.N. Command had no burning desire to push and pursue them back into the horrendous terrain girdling the Yalu. Unless Manchuria could be interdicted, the CCF would fight here from a base of strength, while the U.N. would again be restricted and far from its sources of supply.
On the Yalu, the U.N. defensive line would be four hundred miles long, almost four times the distance it covered in the area of the 38th parallel.
In the spring of 1951 a movement against Red China itself was politically unfeasible in the U.N. As Winston Churchill, soon to return to power in Great Britain, put it, the thought of an Anglo-American army mucking about through Manchuria gave him nightmares. Ridgway, well aware of the processes that had brought him his fourth star, was content to take his direction from Washington.
Washington was seeking any means out of the Korean conflict that might be achieved without surrender, and with honor.
The fighting had escalated from a small limited war to a very large—though still limited—war, and it had poised the world on the brink of a general holocaust.
On 26 May, Lester Pearson of Canada, President of the U.N. General Assembly, stated that surrender of the aggressors might not be required to end the war; the U.N. would be satisfied if the aggression could be brought to an end. On 1 June, Trygve Lie, understanding completely the mood of his charges, mentioned that the time seemed right for stopping the bloodshed, since on this date the Chinese and North Koreans had been driven back across their line of departure. If a cease-fire could be made along the 38th parallel, Lie said, the Security Council resolutions of 25 and 27 June, and 7 July 1950, could be considered carried out.
On 2 June, Dean Acheson publicly agreed with Lie. He said there were actually two problems, one political, one military. While the long-term political approach of the United States, desiring a united, free, and independent Korea had not changed, the immediate problem of concern to Washington was the stopping of the shooting, with assurances it would not begin again. On 7 June, in response to vigorous grilling by a Senate committee, Acheson further stated that any reliable armistice based on the 38th parallel would be acceptable to the United States.
The United States had come full cycle, back from its position of October 1950, to its position of the previous June. The goal was containment, not victory.
And in June, with the CCF very close to real disaster in Korea, Communist thinking altered, too. The Soviet Union wanted neither defeat nor a big war, whatever the firebrands in Peiping desired. The battle lines, except in the west, where they neared the parallel, already stood well above the old line of demarcation, and the situation for the Communist powers was worsening.
It was very clear to Soviet observers that the CCF could not win a decision in South Korea; they could not now even halt the slow, steady U.N. advance northward.
It was also clear that the continuing hot war in the Far East was jangling Western nerves and hastening the slow rearmament of Europe under NATO. The West obviously desired peace—but continued Communist intransigence could tend only to unite the Western allies in the long run.
When Communists cannot win by force, they are prepared to negotiate. If, in 1951, they could stop the U.N. advance by talking, they would firm an increasingly fluid and dangerous situation and in effect achieve a tactical victory.
On 23 June, almost one year from the hour that the Inmun Gun deployed above the parallel, Soviet delegate Yakov A. Malik made a remarkable speech before the U.N. He claimed not to be speaking for the real belligerents, North Korea and Red China, but as a sort of
The greater part of the speech was the usual Soviet reiteration of charges and complaints—but Malik ended on a new note:
'The problem of armed conflict in Korea could … be settled …; as the first step, discussions should be started between the belligerents for a ceasefire and an armistice providing for mutual withdrawal of forces from the 38th parallel … provided there is a sincere desire to put an end to the bloody fighting in Korea.'
If the government Malik represented was sincere, it had apparently now agreed to the present goals of the United Nations Command.
He was immediately challenged by the United States delegate to put up or shut up. Truman repeated the American position in a broadcast. And on 30 June General Ridgway, as U.N. Commander in Chief, radioed the commander of Communist Forces in Korea as follows:
It was a remarkable statement for an American commander, triumphant in the field, to make to an as yet unhumbled enemy. It occurred less than a decade after an American pronouncement of a goal of unconditional surrender of its enemies, but it revealed an aeon of diplomatic and political change in American thinking on the matter of war.
And here, on 30 June, a certain amount of love between the United States and the Taehan Minkuk ended. For the Republic of Korea saw no honor in the proposed cease-fire, which left its people ravaged and still divided. A settlement along the 38th parallel, for all the American and U.N. protestations of continuance of the goal of uniting Korea by peaceful means, meant the separation of Korea into two blocs for as long as man could count, possibly for centuries.
Syngman Rhee was spurred not only by economic and national reasons to oppose peace now, but also by those same reasons that bound Europe's leaders into an emotional straitjacket in 1916-1917, when the Great War stalemated and it seemed sensible to end it. The Taehan Minkuk had gone into the war with its whole heart; it had been devastated, and one in twenty of its people killed or injured. Millions of orphans and homeless wandered its ruins.
To end the war after such wholesale sacrifice with nothing but the
Dr. Rhee issued a statement on 30 June 1951.
The Republic of Korea's conditions for peace were as follows: the CCF must withdraw north of the Yalu; all North Korean Communists must be disarmed; Soviet and Chinese arms assistance to the North must end, under a U.N. guarantee; full ROK participation in any settlement; and no settlement conflicting with the sovereignty or territorial integrity of the Republic of Korea.
