Fifties (11 page)

There were probably many reasons for Spillane’s incredible success. Certainly, the price was seductive—25 cents at first, slipping up to 50 cents by the early fifties—and the covers tended to showcase busty young women either in the process of taking off their clothes or, clearly, from the looks on their faces, about to take them off. Victor Weybright, the chief editor at New American Library, Spillane’s publisher, explained his appeal this way: “The Spillane books are a unique form of ‘Americana,’ a new kind of folklore ...” And it was no insignificant reflection of the times that Mike Hammer soon starting taking on Communists instead of gangsters: “They were Commies.... They were real sons of bitches who should have died long ago.... They never thought there were people like me in
this country.” Kenneth Davis went so far as to call Hammer a reflection of the McCarthyite soul of the country, “the ultimate cold warrior, an Übermensch for frightened Americans who had heard tales of baby-eating Stalinists. Hammer’s methods went beyond loyalty oaths, smears, and blacklisting. The evil of the Communists was battled with the only weapons Hammer possessed: a blast from his forty-five, a kick that shattered bone on impact, strangulation by Hammer’s meaty hands.”

Certainly, the critics hated him. James Sandoe of the
Herald Tribune
called him “an inept vulgarian.” Malcolm Cowley in the
New Republic
called him a dangerous paranoid, sadist, and masochist. Even his own editors seemed a little uneasy with him. Victor Weybright liked to tell reporters that too much was made of the Spillane phenomenon. Such critical salvos did not burden Spillane, who liked to say that he did not care about the critics and that the only critics who mattered were his readers. He thought the literary world was made up of second-rate writers who wrote about other second-rate writers. It was a world of the Losers. “The Losers?” Terry Southern asked him. “The guys who didn’t make it,” he answered, “the guys nobody ever heard of.” Why, asked Southern, would others want to write about Losers? “Because they can be condescending about the Losers. You know, they can afford to say something
nice
about them. You see, these articles are usually written
by
Losers—frustrated writers. And these writers resent success. So naturally they never have anything good to say about the Winners.” “Is it hard to be a Winner?” Southern asked. “No, anybody can be a Winner—all you have to do is make sure you’re not a Loser,” he answered.

FOUR

I
T WAS A WAR
that no one wanted, in a desolate, harsh land. The same policymakers who decreed the necessity for fighting there had only months before declared it of little strategic value and outside our defense perimeter. “If the best minds in the world had set out to find us the worst possible location in the world to fight this damnable war, politically and militarily, the unanimous choice would have been Korea,” Dean Acheson once told the writer Joseph Goulden. “A sour little war,” Averell Harriman once called it. South Korea became important only after the North Korean Communists struck in the night; its value was psychological rather than strategic—the enemy had crossed a border.

At the beginning of the century, Korea was conquered by Japan and forced to live under a brutal occupation. At one point during the war Franklin Roosevelt spoke almost carelessly of a free and independent
Korea after the war; at Yalta there was talk of a trusteeship to be administered by the Big Four. At Potsdam in July 1945, American strategists still thought the final battle against Japan would be difficult and pressed Stalin to help. Having stayed outside the Pacific war for four years, Stalin was delighted to be a part of the denouement. Who could have resisted a chance to gain so much for so little? But the successful use of the atomic weapon changed American thinking. Now we had no need of the Russians in the Far East. Within twenty-four hours of Hiroshima, planners in Washington were redefining America’s position in Korea. Even as the Soviet troops, poised in Manchuria, were moving into the northern part of that country, word came down from the War Department to create some sort of division in Korea between the Communist and non-Communist forces. Available American troops were scarce, our physical position, compared to that of the Russians, was hardly enviable, and time was of the essence. Perhaps the entire country would be Stalin’s for the taking, if not for the asking. On August 10, 1945, late at night, John J. McCloy, the assistant secretary of war, told two young colonels in the War Office to come up with some sort of demarcation line. The two colonels—Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel—studied a schoolboy map of Korea. They noticed a line running across the country at the relatively narrow neck near the midpoint. It was the 38th parallel. Through a procedure slightly more sophisticated than throwing darts at a map, Rusk and Bonesteel suggested this as the dividing line. It was, Rusk thought, a rather risky gambit—that is, if the Russians rejected it and their troops continued to push south aggressively, there was little the Americans could do to hold the line. An offer was made to the Russians, and somewhat to our surprise, they accepted. The first American units did not arrive in the South for another month.

Nothing seemed to show how unprepared America was for its new expanded postwar role than the occupation of Korea. We had no area experts to guide us in those early, awkward days. Wary of all the Korean groups suddenly competing for our attention, we used the existing Japanese colonial administration at first, much to the dismay of the Koreans, who hoped to be liberated from the colonials. Unfortunately, when we finally turned to the Koreans, it was often to those who had collaborated with the Japanese. The first American commander, Major General John Hodge, took an immediate dislike to the people. They were, he said, “the same breed of cat as the Japanese.”

Hodge’s view seemed to reflect that of most Americans. When
Hodge tried to interest his commander, Douglas MacArthur, in visiting Korea, MacArthur preferred to remain in his imperial splendor as governor general of Japan. “Use your best judgment as to what action is to be taken,” he cabled Hodge. “I am not sufficiently familiar with the local situation to advise you intelligently but I will support you in whatever decision you take in this matter.” Hodge was so irritated that he tried to transfer out, but MacArthur refused to allow it.

When another American general was told that his next assignment was to head the American advisory group training the South Korean army, he retired from active service. In those days Japan was a poor nation just beginning to pull itself up from the total disaster of the war, but duty there was considered a sweet tour by American soldiers: American dollars went far, the Japanese women were friendly, and ordinary enlisted men lived like aristocrats, sometimes employing two servants. By contrast most Americans who served in Korea in the postwar period remember the lack of amenities, the terrible heat in the summer, the unbearable cold in the winter, and above all the ubiquitous foul smell of human fecal matter, which the farmers used for fertilizer. Night soil, it was called.

In December 1949, the British Foreign Office asked the War Office for a military assessment of Korea. Major J. E. Ferguson Innes wrote back that North Korea was far stronger than South Korea. “[r]egarding American policy,” he added, “if in fact one exists, towards South Korea, I can only say we know little, and of their future intentions, even less ...” In late 1947, George Kennan, the most brilliant American strategist of the era, saw Korea as a singularly hopeless place: “Its political life in the coming period is bound to be dominated by political immaturity, intolerance, and violence. Where such conditions prevail, the communists are in their element. Therefore we cannot count on native forces to help hold the line against Soviet expansion. Since the territory is not of decisive strategic importance to us, our main task is to extricate ourselves without too great a loss of prestige.” Yet we stayed.

Eventually, we created a government in the South, headed by Syngman Rhee, a volatile, manipulative figure, whose main appeal to us was that he had spent most of his life in exile in America. He spoke good English, had three degrees from American universities, and since he had been out of the country for most of his life, he had not collaborated with the Japanese. He was one of the early postwar, anti-Communist dictators, with an instinctive tendency to arrest almost anyone who did not agree with him. Only by comparison with
his counterpart in the North, Kim Il Sung, did he gain: Sung not only arrested his enemies; he frequently had them summarily executed. Though Rhee, by dint of his intense anti-Communism, had something of a political base in the American Congress, no one who dealt with him directly, either in Washington or Seoul, seemed to like him, certainly not the people at State or Defense. He made them particularly nervous by constantly boasting of his desire to roll back the 38th parallel and rule the entire country. As we were desperately cutting back our military forces, the 30,000 American troops assigned to Korea seemed a disproportionate number to many. General Hodge pushed constantly for the removal of combat troops (most significantly, including himself). By the fall of 1948 we struck a deal with the Russians: We would both withdraw our regular troops, in effect leaving behind proxy armies. At Rhee’s request, we left one regimental combat team until June 1949. Our role was to be solely advisory and Rhee’s troops were to become combat-ready; but because of Rhee’s jingoism and his constant threats to strike above the 38th parallel, we deliberately limited his forces, minimizing his air power and tanks.

As such, our ambivalence remained. We seemed to want no part of the country, and yet we had planted the flag. Deigning to come to Seoul to participate in Rhee’s inauguration, MacArthur told Rhee with casual but typical grandiosity, “If Korea should ever be attacked by the Communists, I will defend it as I would California.” That being said, America was rapidly withdrawing from South Korea, leaving only an advisory mission behind. We were leaving behind something of an unloved and unattractive government with a new, uncertain ragtag army; the Soviets, by contrast, were leaving behind the real thing: a tough, modern dictatorship with a strong, well-trained, well-armed military force. Unlike Rhee, who was the candidate of the upper class in a nation with few aristocrats, Kim Il Sung was the outsider who hated aristocrats and colonialists. His father had been a schoolteacher who moved his family to Manchuria to escape the Japanese. Kim joined the Young Communist League of East Manchuria while barely a teenager and spent most of his life fighting the Japanese with various Communist guerrilla bands. He eventually became a leader of the guerrilla forces in the northern reaches of Korea and also, it was said, commanded a group of one of the two Korean units that fought alongside the Russians at Stalingrad. He held the Order of Lenin, awarded by Stalin himself. When the Russians moved into the North, he was their obvious choice. At first he was a popular figure, for it was widely known that he had
devoted his life to fighting the hated Japanese. That popularity would diminish as the harshness and cruelty of his rule became apparent.

With the aid of the Soviets, he created the North Korean People’s Army, or In Min Gun. It was composed of ten divisions, some 135,000 men; its commanders were, more often than not, Koreans who had fought along with the Chinese Communists during their historic defeat of Chiang’s army. Most importantly, the Russians left behind about 150 T-34 tanks, one of the most effective weapons against the Germans in World War Two.

Rhee was not the only Korean leader who boasted he would conquer the entire peninsula; Kim Il Sung was every bit as audacious. In the fall of 1949, his boasts escalated. A nervous Rhee pushed the Americans for an expanded army and more hardware; but the Americans, suspicious of Rhee’s real intentions, refused. In late 1949 and in the early months of 1950 there was an increasing number of border clashes, almost all of them initiated by the North, whose forces seemed to be probing the Republic of Korea’s (ROK) positions. Reports of an imminent North Korean invasion began coming back to American intelligence officers in Seoul. Those reports proved true on the night of June 25. Why Kim Il Sung chose to invade the South no one has ever been entirely sure. Certainly, he was contemptuous of the leaders of the South and their army. There is some evidence he was encouraged by both the Soviets and the Chinese (in his memoirs, Khrushchev noted that Kim had promised Stalin a quick victory), and it seems that Mao told Kim the Americans would not intervene. Certainly, a statement made by Dean Acheson at the National Press Club in January 1950 left Korea out of the American defensive perimeter in Asia. “Dean really blew it on that one,” Averell Harriman said years later. That particular speech greatly escalated the tension between the Truman administration and the far right, though, ironically, not because of what the secretary said or did not say about Korea. Rather, the problem was the cool disdain with which Acheson dismissed the hero of the right, Chiang Kai-shek. When World War Two ended, Acheson pointed out, Chiang had possessed the greatest military power of any ruler in Chinese history, and he was fighting an ill-equipped, irregular force. Four years later his army had melted away, the secretary continued, and he was a refugee on a small island. To attribute his monumental failure to inadequate foreign support was to miscalculate entirely what had happened. “[The Chinese people] had not overthrown the government. There was nothing to overthrow. They
had simply ignored it,” he said. This may have been the truth, but it was impolitic, to say the least, and Acheson was not lightly forgiven for saying it.

Even as tensions mounted along the Korean border, our own army continued to deteriorate from its wartime prime. Not only was the army’s size diminished, its equipment was outdated and it had lost a high percentage of its elite troops. To Omar Bradley, it could not “fight its way out of a paper bag.” By the end of the Berlin crisis in 1948, it was down to 677,000 men, or ten divisions. In January 1949, Dwight Eisenhower came to Washington as the likely head of the new Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had wanted a budget of $14.4 billion. When Truman offered him the chairmanship, though, Ike turned it down, because he did not think he could live with the $12.3 billion budget. The Truman defense budget, Cabell Phillips wrote in
The New York Times,
had cut “bone and sinew along with the fat.”