they saw fit.
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40
Lessons
— Matthew, 24:6.
THE KOREAN WAR ended inconclusively on 27 July 1953. Not until long afterward was it even dignified by the name of war—the governmental euphemism was Korean conflict—and it rapidly became the most forgotten war in American history. There was little in it, from near-disastrous beginning to honorable but frustrating end, that appealed to American sensibilities. Because they cannot look back on it with any sense of satisfaction, or even the haunted pride that a defeated nation sometimes finds, Americans prefer not to look back at all.
Yet men forget, as always, at their peril.
There have been millions of words written about the cold war, Communist-Western competition, and Korea. Perhaps, as Major Hanson Baldwin wrote:
Somehow, the fateful moments when Task Force Smith first sighted the ominous approach of a powerful enemy from its green wet hills through the Korean rain, or when the 5th and 7th Marines understood that they were cut off and surrounded at frozen Yudam-ni or when General Matthew B. Ridgway asked MacArthur if he had permission to attack 'if things seemed right'—these moments of life and death and human drama have more historic significance than all the words spoken in Cabinet, all the long communiques, all the painful hammering out of the policy of containment.
For every time a nation or a people commits its sons to combat, it inevitably commits its full prestige, its hopes for the future, and the continuance of its way of life, whatever it may be. If the United States ground forces had not eventually held in Korea, Americans would have been faced with two choices: holocaust or humiliation. General, atomic war, in a last desperate attempt to save the game, would have gained Americans none of the things they seek in this world; humiliating defeat and withdrawal from Korea would have inevitably surrendered Asia to a Communist surge, destroying forever American hopes for a free and ordered society across the world.
A nation that does not prepare for all the forms of war should then renounce the use of war in national policy. A people that does not prepare to fight should then be morally prepared to surrender. To fail to prepare soldiers and citizens for limited, bloody ground action, and then to engage in it, is folly verging on the criminal.
This, from the scamper at Osan to the bloody withdrawal from the Ch'ongch'on to the heroic resistance at Chipyong-ni, the Imjin, the Soyang, and Pork Chop Hill, is a lesson Americans and others must take from Korea.
Because the Korean War was not, as most large wars were, the end of an era, but only a bloody skirmish in the middle of the post-World War II age, no definitive history can yet be written. The principal figures of the Korean War are still living, and many are still in power. The game still goes on. Yet Korea set certain patterns for the future.
The Communist powers, notably Soviet Russia, would remember the rapid escalation from a small, almost civil-type conflict into a large-scale action involving most of the major powers of the world. After Korea, overt, brutal armed aggression, which had produced so violent—and unexpected—a counteraction from the West, would be avoided. Now the emphasis would be on infiltration, subversion, and insurgency to gain Communist ends in the fringe areas; the trick was never again, as with the South Korean invasion, to give the West a clear moral issue.
Communist planners, studying the lessons of Korea, could not help wondering what the result might have been could they have slipped several North Korean divisions into the South clandestinely, keeping them supplied across a fluid border. They might well wonder if the West would have then sprung to the defense of autocratic old Dr. Syngman Rhee, even though the interests of the West were equally imperiled.
The Red Chinese, impervious to human loss and suffering, gloried in their sudden leap to large-power status—for by defying the United Nations, and holding the Western armies in check, they became a great power in the East. They learned many of the lessons of modern ground warfare, and proved that Chinese armies could perform creditably in the field. They, more than the Soviets, would be eager to try again, for they had less to lose; but they still could not move without their industrial ally's aid and consent.
Neither power would desire general war, for both were realists, not perhaps in what they say, but in what they do.
They were balked, not defeated. Inevitably, they would try again, if not Korea, elsewhere. Within a year after Korean fighting ended, they would succeed in Vietnam, this time without overt aggression.
From the Korean War the United States drew troubled conclusions. American policy had been to contain Communism along the parallel, and in this, American policy succeeded. But not one realized, at the beginning, how exceedingly costly such containment would be. The war reaffirmed in American minds the distaste for land warfare on the continent of Asia, the avoidance of which has always been a foundation of United States policy. But the war proved that containment in Asia could not be forged with nuclear bombs and that threats were not enough, unless the United States intended to answer a Communist pinprick with general holocaust.
Yet the American people, Army, and leaders generally proved unwilling to accept wars of policy in lieu of crusades against Communism. Innocence had been lost, but the loss was denied. The government that had ordered troops into Korea knew that the issue was never whether Syngman Rhee was right or wrong but that his loss would adversely affect the status of the United States—which was not arguable.
That government's inability to communicate, and its repudiation at the polls, firmly convinced many men of the political dangers of committing American ground troops in wars of containment. Yet without the continual employment of limited force around the globe, or even with it, there was to be no order. The world could not be policed with ships, planes, and bombs—policemen were also needed.
Less than a year after fighting ended in Korea, Vietnam was lost to the West, largely because of the complete repugnance of Americans toward committing a quarter of a million ground troops in another apparently indecisive skirmish with Communism. Even more important, the United States, as the Joint Chiefs of Staff reported, simply did not have the troops.
Korea, from Task Force Smith at Osan to the last days at Pork Chop, indicates that the policy of containment cannot be implemented without professional legions. Yet every democratic government is reluctant to face the fact. Reservists and citizen-soldiers stand ready, in every free nation, to stand to the colors and die in holocaust, the big war. Reservists and citizen-soldiers remain utterly reluctant to stand and die in anything less. None want to serve on the far frontiers, or to maintain lonely, dangerous vigils on the periphery of Asia. There has been every indication that mass call-ups for cold war moves may result in mass disaffection.
The United States will be forced to fight wars of policy during the balance of the century. This is inevitable, since the world is seething with disaffection and revolt, which, however justified and merited, plays into Communist hands, and swings the world balance ever their way. Military force alone cannot possibly solve the problem—but without the application of some military force certain areas, such as Southeast Asia, will inevitably be lost.
However repugnant the idea is to liberal societies, the man who will willingly defend the free world in the fringe areas is not the responsible citizen-soldier. The man who will go where his colors go, without asking, who will fight a phantom foe in jungle and mountain range, without counting, and who will suffer and die in the midst of incredible hardship, without complaint, is still what he has always been, from Imperial Rome to sceptered Britain to
