The Korean War (15 page)

These deployments reflected the costly combination of residual imperial responsibilities, post-war hangovers, and new Cold War perils that burdened the British in 1950. There had been pitifully little money to spare for new equipment since 1945. Many of the formations listed above were seriously under-strength. For the British to find even a single brigade to go to Korea represented a desperate drain on the nation’s overdrawn resources. Yet, in the
first debate on the Korean crisis in the House of Commons on 5 July, the Prime Minister said: ‘I hope the House will not spend very much time on the legal subtleties, but will concentrate on the realities of the situation. I think that no one can have any doubt whatever that here is a case of naked aggression. Surely, with the history of the last twenty years fresh in our minds, no one can doubt that it is vitally important that aggression should be halted at the outset.’

Winston Churchill, for the Opposition, congratulated Attlee. The Conservative Party, he said, would give full support to the government in this matter. One of the more remarkable aspects of the House of Commons at this period was the level of courtesy and understanding Government and Opposition showed to each other, an echo of their wartime coalition experience, when so many among the Labour and Conservative leaderships worked together. A few sceptics such as the Labour MP Tom Driberg, who later served as a war correspondent in Korea, sounded a discordant note. Driberg wrote with disgust in his column in
Reynolds News
of the ‘substantial number of back-bench Tories who, true to their jungle philosophy, cannot help baying at the smell of blood in the air’.
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It is in danger of being forgotten today that at this period in Britain, as well as in America, there was intense fear in government circles, bordering upon paranoia, about communist penetration of national institutions. As the Korean crisis escalated, the British government was fearful that communist-led dockers would sabotage troop and munitions movement, and reacted nervously to evidence of minor incidents at the ports. Attlee addressed the British people about the need to stand alongside the Americans in the Far East – ‘The fire that has been started in distant Korea may burn down your own house.’ But in a recruiting speech, he made direct reference to dangers of treachery at home: ‘I would ask you all to be on your guard against the enemy within. There are those who would stop at nothing to injure our economy and our defence.’

The direct consequences of Korea for Britain included the
extension of National Service to two years, and a mounting balance of payments deficit as a result of rearmament. But even most left-wing socialists conceded the justice of the American cause in Korea. There was almost a euphoria among MPs about the raising of the banner of the United Nations. ‘I should like to remark,’ said Mr Harry Hopkins, the member for Taunton, ‘that we are, in fact, witnessing something quite unique in the enforcement by arms of collective security by a world organisation . . . That is something that has never before occurred in the history of the world and it is, at least, a consolation that we are moving along the lines towards an international police force.’ Thus, full of wordy ideals as well as economic and strategic fears, the British made their modest commitment to the cause of South Korea.

4. Seoul

At 7 a.m. on Sunday morning, 25 June, Major-General Paek Sun Yup, the thirty-year-old commander of the South Korean 1st Division, was telephoned at home by his Operations officer to be told that the ROK forces on the west bank of the Imjin had been overrun. He himself had been away from his formation for ten days, attending a course at the army command school. Now, he took a taxi at once to ROK army headquarters, in the old Japanese headquarters building in Seoul. The atmosphere there was still surprisingly calm: there was no understanding of the scale of the communist offensive. Colonel Rockwell, his senior American adviser, took Paek in his own jeep to collect one of his regimental commanders who was at home in Seoul for the weekend. Then the three men drove north, up roads still peaceful, because the Korean public had been told nothing of the crisis.

At the divisional command post, they found that half the men
were away on weekend leave. Officers trickled in. Paek’s units were digging in south of the Imjin, but they had no wire, and they had already lost contact with one regiment north of the river. The commander and some stragglers escaped south a few minutes ahead of the North Koreans. It was learnt that the engineers had failed to blow the Imjin bridges behind them. On Monday 26 June, the division held its ground south of the river. But they learned that the 7th Division, on their right, had collapsed completely. They received a bitter blow when Colonel Rockwell and their other American advisers announced that they had been ordered to leave the front. Some of the Americans shed tears in their embarrassment. The Koreans were utterly dismayed. Paek said, ‘We thought that it was for this kind of situation that they were there, to help us.’
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Then the American KMAG jeeps drove away southwards, leaving the Koreans alone.

The next day, they began to retreat. That afternoon, Paek received orders from one of his superiors immediately to pull back to the south bank of the Han river, south of Seoul. That order was hastily countermanded by the army chief of staff. But the ROK 3rd and 5th Divisions, committed piecemeal to the battle, were being rolled back by the communists. Everywhere the line was crumbling. On the afternoon of the 28th, the North Koreans broke through on their right flank. By now, American aircraft were overflying the front, looking for targets. But the ROKs possessed no forward air controllers, and no contact with the planes. They were compelled to watch many unloading their ordnance on empty paddy fields. Far worse, hundreds of tons of bombs were unloaded upon ROK troops by the USAF in those first, chaotic days. One of Paek’s regimental commanders announced that he knew a place where they might get a ferry across the Han. Paek told his men to make their way out as best they could, and head for a rendezvous north of Suwon. Then, in small groups, they made for the river, crossed at the ferry, and started walking south – colonels, generals and privates alike. After one week of war, Syngman Rhee’s army could account for only 54,000 of its men. The remaining 44,000
had merely disappeared, many of them never to be seen again. ‘South Korean casualties as an index to fighting have not shown adequate resistance capabilities or the will to fight,’ MacArthur signalled bluntly to Washington, ‘and our best estimate is that complete collapse is imminent.’

Ferris Miller, the American who had first come to Seoul as a naval officer in 1945, and was now an economic aid adviser working from an office in the Banda Hotel, spent the night of Saturday 24 June playing mahjong at the Nationalist Chinese Embassy across from the Catholic Cathedral. On Sunday morning, he rose late, heard the news, and hastened to wake up a Korean politician friend. ‘It’s only a skirmish,’ he told Miller casually. ‘It won’t amount to much.’
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Through the hours that followed, Miller watched the tempo of panic rise: vehicles careering through the streets at reckless speed, radio appeals for military personnel. From a hotel room, he watched communist planes strafing. Yet still Miller could not escape a sense of ridicule, of fantasy, about what he was seeing.

That evening, he attended a long-scheduled dinner party at the US Army compound. Here, he found growing signs of nervousness. By Monday night, looking out of his apartment window, he could see the gunflashes on the northern horizon. Then he heard on the US Armed Forces radio that the situation was stabilising. Emergency feeding arrangements would be suspended. As from Tuesday, all US personnel would once again be required to pay for meals in the mess. Miller went to bed somewhat reassured.

But in the early hours of the morning, there was a fierce banging on his door. An American officer told him to bring a toothbrush and pyjamas to US headquarters in the Banda Hotel. Amidst a total blackout, he packed his possessions in two footlockers, and drove to the US Embassy. Here, he found chaos: men burning documents in great heaps on the street outside, Koreans besieging the building for help in making their escapes. Inside,
Miller saw a Korean woman sobbing helplessly, amid officials hastening to and fro. ‘Help me, help me,’ she begged him. ‘My husband is in the States.’ Miller could do nothing. At dawn, buses came to take the staff out to Kimpo for evacuation. Miller was one of the last to leave. He felt guilty, as he pushed his footlockers into the hold of a C-47, conscious of all the men and women around him who had salvaged nothing. The Ambassador’s secretary climbed aboard with a dog under one arm, a bottle of scotch under the other. Then they started the engines, and taxied bumpily across the tarmac for take-off. Only when they landed in Japan did they discover holes in the fuselage from stray communist ground fire. Only later did they learn of those left behind: the mining adviser who overslept in his billet, and was never heard of again; the party of Americans who had been attending a wedding in Kaeson, and became prisoners in North Korea for three long years.

Lee Chien Ho, a twenty-one-year-old tax collector’s son studying chemical engineering at National University, was in a barber’s shop having his hair cut on the morning of 25 June, when the news of the North Korean invasion came through on the radio. His father was away in Inchon. Unlike many Koreans, Lee was eager to take some part in the defence of his country. He and a few score like-minded students spent much of the next two days at their university campus east of the city, pathetically standing guard armed with broomsticks. On the second night of their vigil, South Korean army stragglers began to come through from Uijambu. ‘What do you kids think you’re doing?’ demanded one. They told him they were defending the university. ‘You’re out of your minds,’ the soldier said. ‘Go home.’ Bewildered, they drifted away in ones and twos towards the city, among the dejected military fugitives. He slept that night at the School of Liberal Arts, by the streetcar terminal. Walking out the next morning, he saw a long row of large, shiny government cars abandoned neatly in front of the
railway station. It was his first tremor of understanding of the scale of the disaster.
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Lee went home and told his mother that he was sure they should leave. At first, she was bitterly reluctant to abandon all their household possessions. The banks were closed, so they had no means of recovering their money. But at last, he persuaded her. On Tuesday afternoon, carrying a sack of rice on his back and leading his two younger brothers, Lee led his mother through the streets towards the Han river bridge. Curiously enough, he found few others going their way, and many re-entering the city from the south. They laughed at the family, burdened with their belongings: ‘What are you so worried about?’ That night, they slept in a schoolhouse, disturbed by the thunder of heavy rain on the roof, and distant guns. The next morning, as they walked on southwards, they heard the huge explosion as the Han river bridge was blown by Rhee’s retreating army. They struggled on, amidst a growing army of panic-stricken soldiers and frantic civilians, a confusion of abandoned possessions on the road and low-flying aircraft sweeping overhead: the wreckage of defeat.

To Suk Bun Yoon, a thirteen-year-old middle school pupil, the son of a merchant, the North Koreans looked more like a defeated army than a victorious one as they straggled into Seoul.
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Suk and his family had spent much of the previous two days hiding in a sewage pipe. On the 27th, they struggled through the seething mass of refugees towards the Han river. But the press, the hysteria, the screaming mass of humanity fighting to reach the ferries, was too great. Despondent and frightened, they returned home to await their fate. On the morning of the 28th, as the first communists arrived, civilians in red arm bands hastened through the streets, urging the watching citizens to cheer their liberators. Some did so. But most of the older people slipped away to their houses, from whose windows they peered nervously out into the street at the solemn, olive-clad files padding past, some still wearing
camouflage foliage in their helmets. Many hundreds of thousands of the small men and women of Korean society, whose names featured on no lists, whose lives had merely been a struggle for survival, were unsure what to make of the communists’ coming. Won Jung Kil was a peasant’s son who had grown up in Inchon as the breadwinner of a family of eight. Their father was dead, Won had no fixed employment: ‘We thought about food – nothing else.’
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Inchon was a stronghold of communist sympathies of a primitive kind: Won and his kind hated Syngman Rhee because he did nothing for the working man, and loathed the police for their privileges. He himself was in Seoul the day war broke out. He hastened home, uncertain what to think. He found the local communists running exultant through the streets, preparing a grand welcome for the North Korean army. The family talked. They decided that it was safer to go. There might be fighting in the town. They gathered up saucepans, blankets, children, and began walking southwards. They expected that it would be safe to come home in a week. In reality, they were embarking on a three-year odyssey that would be shared by millions of their fellow-country men; that would cost them their home – a shack carelessly destroyed by the warring armies; their freedom – for the young men of the family were conscripted, and spent three years barely subsisting in uniform; and enormous hardship for the women, who would exist chiefly upon American milk powder and herbs picked from the mountains until many months after the war ended. For the nations of the West, the war that had now come to Korea represented a challenge to the principles of freedom and anti-communism. The democracies were to endure huge anxieties and frustrations in the course of seeking to meet this. But for the people of Korea, three years of unspeakable tragedy, privation, and sacrifice had begun, from which scarcely a family in that unhappy land would be spared.