Stassen was also present and later testified that the majority present favored the following policies:
1. European aid should be given priority over Asia.
2. Aid to Asia should not be started until after a “long and careful study.”
3. Russian Communists should be considered “not as aggressive as Hitler” and “not as apt to take direct military action to expand their empire.”
4.
5. Britain and India should be urged to follow suit in recognizing the Chinese Communists.
6.
7. The Communists should be allowed to take over Hong Kong from Britain if the Communists insisted.
8. Nehru should not be given aid because of his “reactionary and arbitrary tendencies.”
9. The Nationalist blockade of China should be broken and
10.
Two of the men at the conference who were foremost in promoting these policies were Owen Lattimore and Lawrence Rosinger. Both were eventually identified by Louis Budenz (former editor of the Daily Worker testifying under oath) as members of the Communist Party.{89}
Even if there had been no such identification, the glaring truth which every man at the conference should have known was the fact that this entire list of policies was a car bon copy of the prevailing “party line” coming out of Moscow. For months these very policies had been hammered out in every edition of the Communist press. It was a singular commentary on the judgment and professional discernment of those officials who fell in with these fantastic recommendations—particularly in the light of the provocative and inflammatory policies which Russia was using at that very moment to threaten nations in nearly every region of the free world.
Three months after this conference, the new Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, announced several policies portending the loss of Formosa and the liquidation of the Chinese Nationalists by the Communists. First, he overruled the recommendation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (to give strong military aid to Chiang) by announcing on January 12, 1950, that the principles itemized above as point No. 6 and point No. 10 was to be official U.S. policy. He also stated that the U.S. defense perimeter in the Pacific did not include either Formosa or South Korea. He stated that if an attack should occur outside the U.S. defense perimeter “the initial reliance must be on the people attacked to resist it.” Then he suggested that they could appeal to the United Nations.
This was simply a blunt statement that the U.S. diplomats were abandoning Formosa and Korea. This announcement was shocking to many students of the Far East, not only because the policy violated U.S. self- interest, but because it literally invited Communist attack on these free-world allies by giving advance notice that these areas could be invaded without interference from the United States.
It took just six months for the Communists to select and prepare their point of attack. They chose the practically defenseless territory of South Korea as the first theater of war.
The Communist Attack on South Korea
It will be recalled that the Yalta agreement allowed Russia to take over North Korea at the same time the Soviets occupied Manchuria. As elsewhere, the Russians did not withdraw their troops until a strong Communist puppet government was firmly entrenched. As for South Korea, U.S. forces occupied the territory up to the 38th parallel.
During 1949 a United Nations mandate required both Russia and the U.S. to withdraw their troops. The Russians left behind them a powerful North Korean Red Army consisting of 187,000 well-trained and well-equipped troops, 173 Russian tanks, quantities of Russian-built artillery and 200 Russian planes. On the other hand, South Korea was a new-born Republic with an army of 96,000 men who were poorly equipped with practically no tanks, anti-tank weapons, heavy artillery or fighter planes. This meant that by the end of 1949 South Korea was even more vulnerable to attack from North Korea than Formosa was from Communist China. And the Washington diplomats had assured both Formosa and Korea that in case of attack they definitely could not expect any military help from the United States. As spokesman for the diplomatic left-wing contingent, Owen Lattimore explained the situation: “The thing to do is let South Korea fall, but not to let it look as if we pushed it.”{90}
In the early dawn of Sunday, June 25, 1950, 8 divisions of the North Korean Red Army spilled across the 38th parallel and plunged southward toward the city of Seoul. Frantic calls went out from President Sigmund Rhee to the Security Council of the United Nations, to President Truman in Washington and to General Douglas MacArthur in Japan. All three responded. The Security Council pronounced North Korea guilty of a breach of the peace and ordered her troops back to the 38th parallel. (If Russia had been represented, she no doubt would have vetoed this action, but the Soviet delegates were boycotting the Security Council because China continued to be represented by the Nationalists rather than by the Chinese Communists.)
General MacArthur responded by flying to Korea and reporting the desperate situation to Washington. President Truman responded by completely reversing the policy of his diplomatic advisers and ordering General MacArthur to pour U.S. ground troops in from Japan to stop the red tide. Thus the war began.
For several weeks the situation looked very black. General MacArthur was made supreme commander of all United Nations forces, but at first these were so limited that the shallow beachhead at Pusan was about all they could hold. Then General MacArthur formulated a desperate plan. It was so difficult and illogical that he felt certain it would come to the Communists as a complete surprise. It did. On September 15, half way up the Korean Peninsula, the U.S. Navy (with two British carriers), the Air Force, Army and Marine Corps combined to launch an ingenious invasion at Inchon—a point where the 29-foot tide made a landing seem fantastic. Split-second timing permitted landings and the next thing the North Koreans knew they were trapped in the jaws of a mighty military pincer movement which cut across their supply lines and then rapidly closed in to wipe out the flower of the whole North Korean Army which, of course, was concentrated in the South. It was a magnificent victory.
MacArthur then turned his armies toward the north. The ROK’s (South Koreans) went up the East Coast while other U.N. troops went up the West Coast. In doing this, General MacArthur was required to act on obscure hints rather than specific directions from Washington and the U.N. For a while it appeared that he might be forbidden to pursue the enemy forces retreating to the North.
By the middle of October the coastal spearheads of the U.N. offensive were nearing the northernmost parts of Korea and the war appeared practically over. There was the immediate prospect of unifying the entire Korean Peninsula and setting up a democratic republic. Then, in November, unexpectedly disaster struck.
From across the northern Korean boundary of the Yalu River came the first flood tide of what turned out to be a Chinese Communist army of one million men. As these troops came pouring into North Korea, the U.N. forces found themselves smothered by a great wave of fanatical, screaming, and suicidal humanity. MacArthur radioed to Washington: “We face an entirely new war!”
The U.N. lines were cut to ribbons as their wall of defense was pushed back below the 38th parallel. General MacArthur could scarcely believe that the Chinese Communists would dare to risk the massive retaliation of the United States atomic bombing Air Force by this inexcusable assault on U.N. forces. However, what he did not know, but soon discovered, was the appalling fact that the Chinese had already been assured by their intelligence agents that the diplomats in Washington, London and New York were not going to allow MacArthur to retaliate with the U.S. Air Force. MacArthur was going to be restricted to “limited” warfare.
It was in this hour that General MacArthur found that pro-Communist forces in the U.N. and left-wing sympathizers in the State Department were swamping the policies of the White House, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and those who had charge of the Korean War. He found that vast supplies which he badly needed were being diverted to Europe in accordance with point No. 1 of the State Department Conference. He was specifically restricted from following Chinese jets to their bases or bombing the Manchurian Railroad which was dumping mountains of supplies on the north banks of the Yalu River. He was forbidden to bomb the Yalu bridge over which troops and supplies were funneled, and his own supplies and replacements were cut back to the point where a counter- offensive became strategically difficult, if not impossible. The final blow came when the diplomats flatly turned
