The psychological pressures on Chinese Intelligence became enormous. Neither an evaluative nor a collective agency, even when it feels it is being taken, dares ignore evidence.
China, losing the propaganda war, had yet gained tremendous prestige on the Korean battlefield. It had engaged the armies of the West and seemingly fought them to a standstill; it had leaped into great-power status in the Orient in a day. But if the United States threw the weight of its industrial and nuclear power onto the scales, power which so far it had held back, the Chinese gains could vanish even more quickly.
While they still spoke boastfully, in the frozen gardens of Peiping there were men who worried. In addition to military concerns, it had been a bad year economically from the Elbe to the Yalu; in many areas harvests were light, spelling trouble in the months to come.
On 5 March 1953 Joseph Stalin died. And because Stalin, like all dictators, had never really dared plan for his own succession but had systematically destroyed anyone seemingly capable of replacing him, the monolithic structure of Russian Communism was doomed.
Before Stalin was eulogized and in his tomb, the struggle for power within the Kremlin began. Before it was over, far in the future, the foundations of the Soviet state would be shaken to their roots.
And with the news, the satellite states, plagued with shortages and famine, suddenly hopeful, seethed with revolt. In East Germany, restlessness would result in open defiance before summer.
The Soviet state could survive both internal power struggles and satellite revolt, but all factions within the Kremlin had no time now for foreign adventures. For a certain length of time, Russia, still not recovered from the ravages of the Second World War but pushed on by Stalin's steel will, would require a respite, for the steel will was gone.
On 6 March 1953, it was time for the sound of the dove in the land, and the invention of the Peace Offensive.
It was time, now, to tempt fate no longer, and to place certain subtle but unmistakable pressures on the Chinese comrades, who, though concerned, still hated to give up a good thing.
Many things, joined together, now moved the world toward great events. In the spring of 1953, the leaders of the United States and the non-Communist world wanted peace. The Communist leadership desperately needed it.
Suddenly, ironically, there was a community of interest in the world, however fleeting it might be.
In the middle of the night in Tokyo, 28 March 1953, Wayne Clark was called out of bed to receive a message from Peng Teh-huai and Kim II Sung. As Clark groggily scanned the message, replete with the usual Communist complaint, abuse, and prevarication, one paragraph suddenly stood out.
Peng and Kim not only agreed that exchange of sick and wounded POW's was a good idea; they suggested that the plenary sessions at Panmunjom, in permanent recess since 8 October, be resumed at once.
Excited, but with much skepticism, Clark pushed the buttons that made it so. More than anything else, he was wondering what new trick the Communists had up their sleeve.
But on 30 March, Chou En-lai, Foreign Minister of Red China, announced publicly that China and North Korea might accept the idea of a neutral repatriation commission for the screening of all POW's.
At Panmunjom the liaison officers from the north suddenly exhibited an interest in progress never heretofore shown.
President Eisenhower said in Washington that the United States would accept every Communist offer at face value 'until it was proved unworthy of our confidence.' It was at this time that certain Communist leaders, who had been deeply concerned, began to wonder if Dwight Eisenhower might not genuinely be a man of peace. But the die was cast; in their secret conclaves the decision had already been made. The Communist world would try to salvage as much from Korea as they might, but they would withdraw. The adventure was over.
Because of the Communist salvage operations, the end would not come suddenly, but gradually. Men would still die on the gloomy hills, and fighting would still go on, while the Communists stubbornly tried to gain what they could from the POW debacle, for the Communists could never completely forego testing an opponent's will.
On 11 April, both sides agreed on terms for the exchange of sick and wounded captives. The U.N. would return 5,800; the Communists only 684: 471 ROK's, 149 Americans, and 64 from other nations.
For the first time, Americans had concrete evidence that not all of the 8,000 men they had lost into Communist captivity would return home. They did not yet understand the sickening fact that 58 percent of their men had perished in the dreary camps along the Yalu—and when they did, the moves toward peace were already far advanced, and no disclosures of atrocities could delay them.
Around the world, the hopes for a genuine peace rose. Newsmen flocked to Korea as they had not done since the summer of 1950. And it was while the hopes were highest, and newsmen gathered outside the demilitarized zone, that the Chinese tested the United States for the last time on Pork Chop, and made the dying there doubly cruel.
On 20 April, when Pork Chop had hardly cooled, Operation Little Switch began; the American sick and wounded came home, as Americans thought. It was only later, much after 26 April, when the exchanges ended, that Americans learned that the enemy had not played fair—many of the men exchanged on Little Switch were not hardship cases but those amenable to the Chinese, the 'collaborators,' whom the Communists expected to give a favorable picture of their captivity on return.
After the waves of sentimentality that poured from the press, any future attempts at wholesale punishment of these weaker prisoners was compromised at the start. The Chinese gambit was highly successful. The American public, understandably, gave its immediate forgiveness to the 'sick and wounded,' and rightly or wrongly, the military forces could not muster public support for harsh measures against those they claimed had been guilty of misconduct behind the wire.
The day after Little Switch ended, 27 April 1953, negotiations to end the fighting began in earnest. The Communists submitted a six-point proposal, the main points of which were:
All POW's desiring repatriation would be returned home two months following an armistice.
One month later, all others would be sent to a neutral state, where for a period of six months agents of their home countries would be allowed to make explanations to them.
Captives asking for repatriation from the neutral country would be released immediately.
If any POW's remained at the end of six months, the question of their disposal would be submitted to the political conference that was to follow the armistice.
May 1953 was spent in arguing modifications of the above—the United Nations wanted strict time limitations—and hammering out the selection of nations that might sit on the neutral commission. Late in the month the enemy became more active all along the line, but concentrated on non- American units. Several outposts were lost.
In June, the plenary sessions went into secret meetings, while the enemy launched 104 separate attacks on the U.N. lines, and 131,800 rounds of artillery fell on U.N. lines during a single day. During June, and later in July, the heaviest attacks and fire the enemy had launched in two years crashed against the front, and American opinion was divided. Some felt the Communists were out to wreck the peace talks; others thought they were merely firing up their painfully hoarded ammunition supplies before a truce was signed.
On 4 June the Communists effectively agreed to all major American counterproposals. The way had not been easy; they had fought a rear-guard action all the way, disputing each small point.
In final form, the POW question was settled as follows:
Within two months, each side, without hindrance, would repatriate all POW's desiring return.
A neutral commission would be set up within the demilitarized zone to accept custody of POW's of each side refusing to return. The commission and the POW's would be guarded by Indian troops.
Explanations might be made to reluctant POW's by agents of each side for a period of ninety days, then,
For thirty days, while the POW's continued in Indian custody, a conference would try to settle the eventual disposition of any who still refused to go home.
At the expiration of this time, any POW for whom no provision had been made would be released to civilian
