Mao tepidly endorsed Kim's adventure. The Korean leader probably exaggerated the temperature of Mao's endorsement when he communicated it to Moscow. Stalin had already started sending Kim weapons; they “began to arrive in huge numbers at the port of Chongjin” in April, says a North Korean general. Now Stalin signaled his approval of Kim's war of liberation by dispatching a team of Soviet advisers to Pyongyang. The Chinese leadership felt betrayed by Stalin's alliance with Kim II Sung. Dogged by delays, Mao was forced to put his Taiwan invasion on hold — permanently, as it turned out. If there had not been a Korean war in the summer of 1950 there might well have been a Chinese war between the United States and the People's Republic of China.
At four a.m. on Sunday, June 25, 1950, the North Korean army attacked on the Ongjin Peninsula on the western coast of Korea and then generally along the 38th parallel that divided North and South. Fourteen thousand of the invaders were ethnic Koreans from China — Chinese soldiers in Korean uniforms. Kim's Soviet advisers had proposed the day and time; it matched Hitler's invasion of the USSR on the morning of Sunday, June 22, 1941. US Ambassador to South Korea John Muccio, tired from a late night playing strip poker with several of the embassy secretaries, cabled the news to the State Department. Apprised by phone at his Maryland farm, Acheson immediately ordered the department “to take the steps which were necessary” to convene the United Nations Security Council the next day. Only after making that first crucial decision did Acheson call Truman, who was spending the weekend at his wife's family home in Independence, Missouri. “In succeeding days,” writes historian Bruce Cumings after authoritative research, “Acheson dominated the decision-making which soon committed American air and ground forces to the fight.” Acheson saw Korea as an opportunity to compel a lethargic United States to confront the Communist challenge, “to remove many things,” as he later noted, “from the realm of theory,” to begin the work of containment if not rollback. “Korea is not a local situation,” Acheson would observe a year later in a secret government discussion. “… It was the spearpoint of a drive made by the whole Communist control group on the entire power position of the West… [Korea is a]
testing ground.” “The Greece of the Far East,” Truman agreed, alluding to the Truman Doctrine. Of his decision to commit US ground troops to Korea, the President bragged, “We have met the challenge of the pagan wolves.”
A Soviet veto in the UN Security Council might have blocked UN commitment (in which case the US would certainly have gone into Korea alone). Andrei Gromyko, who had been the chief Soviet delegate to the United Nations until 1948, advised Stalin to use the veto. Stalin demurred. “In my opinion,” he told Gromyko, “the Soviet representative must not take part in the Security Council meeting.” Stalin may have believed Kim II Sung's representation that the war would be over in a matter of days, too quickly for UN intervention, or he may have been maneuvering to forestall a US declaration of war — not likely if the US was fighting under the UN flag — that might eventually involve China and trigger Soviet participation under the Soviet-Chinese treaty of alliance. Dmitri Volkogonov confirms that “Stalin took an extremely cautious view of events in Korea and from the outset made every attempt to avoid direct confrontation between the USSR and the USA.”
US troop strength worldwide, Army and Marines both, was only 669,000 in June 1950, the largest contingent — four divisions, about 100,000 men — positioned in Japan. North Korea could field a force of two hundred thousand if required, China millions more. The Joint Chiefs expressed themselves to be “extremely reluctant” to commit ground troops. Acheson and Truman overruled them when General Douglas MacArthur reported from Japan that the South Koreans had ceased to fight; US forces went in on June 30. By then the North Koreans had already taken Seoul. They would push south almost to the end of the peninsula before MacArthur would contrive to cut them off and drive them back.
Curtis LeMay believed he knew a way to end the invasion as quickly as it had begun. “We slipped a note kind of under the door into the Pentagon,” he recalled in retirement, “and said, ‘Look, let us go up there… and burn down five of the biggest towns in North Korea — and they're not very big — and that ought to stop it.’ Well, the answer to that was four or five screams — ‘You'll kill a lot of noncombatants,’ and ‘It's too horrible.’” The only lesson LeMay thought he learned in Korea was “how not to use the strategic air weapon.” By the time of the Korean War, that weapon was becoming formidable.
22
Lessons of Limited War
Curtis LeMay had been building and training the Strategic Air Command with unflagging determination since he took charge in October 1948. “I see no other way of being ready when the whistle blows,” he told an audience of officers at the Armed Forces Staff College several years later, “unless you do day after day exactly what you are going to do when the fighting starts. And that's what we're doing now and have been doing for some time.”
At the beginning of the new decade of the 1950s, in a little more than a year, SAC had grown by more than one-third, from 52,000 people to more than 71,000. They flew and supported 868 aircraft. Most of SAC's bombers were still B-29s, but the proportion of B-50s was increasing and B-36s were beginning to come in. By January 1950, eighteen atomic-bomb assembly crews had been qualified, with four more to be added by June, when LeMay would have more than 250 operational atomic-modified aircraft.
His primary mission, as a SAC historian describes it, was to “lay down an atomic attack on Russia in the event of war.” LeMay interpreted that mission to mean an all-out attack at the beginning of war, a strategy he called a “Sunday punch.” To see how well his crews were trained, he staged a major maneuver on June 6, 1950, involving half the aircraft under his command. Without leaving the United States, crews picked up unarmed atomic bombs assembled for the occasion (lacking their nuclear capsules, that is, as fissle core modules had come to be called), flew equivalent distances to forward bases and bombed equivalent targets. Deployment, as planned, took three days, the strike phase three more. Eglin Air Force Base in Florida stood in for Moscow and radar confirmed that ten of the eleven atomic bombs assigned to the Soviet capital in current targeting plans would have found their target had they been dropped. “Screening aircraft preceded the bomb carriers over the target,” a report of the exercise notes, “with chaff[41] and spot jamming being utilized by all aircraft. Bombing was by squadrons, and night withdrawal was to the west.” Fifty-eight bomb carriers simulated dropping bombs; some of them arrived back at their bases with as little as seventy-five gallons of fuel left in their tanks. Unlike the debacle over Dayton, Ohio, a year and a half earlier, this exercise was a success; all seventeen designated target areas — on the books, Soviet urban areas — were hit. “This,” concludes the report, “was the first realistic test of Strategic Air Command's ability to deploy and execute the initial strike.”
Three weeks later, on June 25, North Korea invaded South Korea. LeMay's response was swift. He knew he was prepared to execute his war plan, but he had no atomic bombs. “The military services didn't own a single one,” he recalled bitterly in retirement. “These bombs were too horrible and too dangerous to entrust to the military. They were under lock and key of the
Atomic Energy Commission--That worried me a little bit… So I finally sent somebody to see the guy who had the key. We were guarding them.
Our troops guarded them. But we didn't own them… [On June 27] I sent somebody out to have a talk with this guy with the key. I felt that under certain conditions — say we woke up some morning and there wasn't any Washington or something — I was going to take the bombs.” The “guy who had the key” was General Robert M. Montague, the commanding general of Sandia Base in Albuquerque where the atomic bombs were stored. LeMay's chief of staff described LeMay's side bet with Montague in July, when LeMay sought approval for it from USAF Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg, as “in essence that in the event that Washington was destroyed before we had received word to execute our war plan, and in the absence of communications with the alternate headquarters USAF… General LeMay would contact General Montague, identifying himself by a system of code words and attain release of the bombs to our bombardment crews.” LeMay later explained his thinking to a team of Air Force historians:
If we got into a position where the President was out of action or something else turned up, I was going to at least get the bombs and get them to my outfits and get them loaded and ready to go — at least do that much… I would have [released them] under certain circumstances, yes… If I were on my own and half the country was destroyed and I could get no orders and so forth, I wasn't going to sit there fat, dumb and happy and do nothing… I may not have waited until half the country was destroyed, but I felt I had to do something in case no one else was capable of doing anything… If we were under attack and I hadn't received orders for some reason, or any other
