Isegoria

At the end of May 1951, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), the CCF had proved they could not prevail in open warfare in the more maneuverable ground of southern and middle Korea:

But the U.N. Command had no burning desire to push and pursue them back into the horrendous terrain girdling the Yalu. Unless Manchuria could be interdicted, the CCF would fight here from a base of strength, while the U.N. would again be restricted and far from its sources of supply.

[...]

It was very clear to Soviet observers that the CCF could not win a decision in South Korea; they could not now even halt the slow, steady U.N. advance northward.

It was also clear that the continuing hot war in the Far East was jangling Western nerves and hastening the slow rearmament of Europe under NATO. The West obviously desired peace — but continued Communist intransigence could tend only to unite the Western allies in the long run.

When Communists cannot win by force, they are prepared to negotiate.

On 30 June 1951, General Ridgway, as U.N. Commander in Chief, radioed the commander of Communist Forces in Korea an offer to discuss an armistice:

It was a remarkable statement for an American commander, triumphant in the field, to make to an as yet unhumbled enemy. It occurred less than a decade after an American pronouncement of a goal of unconditional surrender of its enemies, but it revealed an aeon of diplomatic and political change in American thinking on the matter of war.

And here, on 30 June, a certain amount of love between the United States and the Taehan Minkuk ended. For the Republic of Korea saw no honor in the proposed cease-fire, which left its people ravaged and still divided.

[...]

Rhee, threatening again and again to block an armistice desired by most, became less and less a heroic old resistor of Communism and more and more a stubborn, opinionated old tyrant, determined to keep the West from getting what it wanted.

[...]

The United Nations Command, not caring to be technical, accepted Kaesong. It was to learn that Communists propose nothing, not even truce sites, without an eye to their own advantage.

[...]

From the American and U.N. point of view, the sole purpose of the meetings at Kaesong was to end the bloodshed, and to create some sort of machinery to supervise such an armistice. This done, an entirely separate body would sift the political and territorial questions posed by the Korean situation, in an atmosphere of peace.

Americans, even the knowledgeable Dean Acheson, had once again tried to separate peace and war into neat compartments, to their sorrow.

[...]

They [the American delegates] were soldiers, come to forge a military agreement to end the killing.

[...]

Several of these men [the Communist delegates] were graduates of Soviet universities, and not one was a fighting man.

All had held political posts, and with typical Communist deviousness, seemingly the junior man at the table in rank, Hsieh Fang, was the man who actually held the Communist cards.

Immediately, it became apparent that the Communist delegation intended not only to discuss the proposed cease-fire but everything up to and including the kitchen drain.

Immediately, they would not agree to an agenda. Immediately, they made sharp protest at Turner Joy’s use of the word “Communists” — there were no “Communists” in Kaesong, but only Inmun Gun and Chinese Volunteers; on the other hand, they used such terms as “that murderer Rhee” and “the puppet of Taiwan” quite freely.

They insisted that the 38th parallel must be the new line of demarcation, although the U.N. armies in most places stood well above it — and the parallel, as had been proved, was hardly a defensible line — and that unless the United Nations Command ceased actual hostilities in Korea at once they could not discuss the armistice. They at once refused demands to permit the International Red Cross to inspect North Korean POW camps.

And from the selection of the site at Kaesong — in Communist hands, yet still below the parallel, one of the few spots in Korea where this condition obtained — the forcing of U.N. negotiators to enter Communist territory displaying white flags, as if they were coming to surrender, to the seating of Admiral Joy in a chair substantially lower than Nam Il’s, the enemy showed that nothing was too small to be overlooked, if it accrued to his advantage.

[...]

The tragedy of the talks was that the Communists intended merely to transfer the war from the battlefield, where they were losing, to the conference table, where they might yet win something.

The United Nations’ desire for peace was genuine — almost frantic. Nothing else could have kept their negotiators, subjected to harassment, stinging insult, and interminable delay, at the green table after the first few sessions.

[...]

Washington was still not seeing clearly. No one dared guess that it would take 159 plenary sessions and more than two years of haggling to end the killing.

[...]

But time, above all, was what the Communist world needed in Korea in the summer of 1951.

Inside the U.S. POW camps, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), Communists and non-Communists jostled for control, so they were separated:

But the screening did have one result. The worst Communists, officers and men alike, were segregated into compounds like the soon-to-be-notorious 76. The segregation did not have the desired result; instead, it concentrated Communist talent.

[...]

When the Americans told the prisoners to elect representatives from each compound, Lee and Hong were ready. The campaign was brief, violent, and secretly bloody.

[...]

Occasionally, the guards would find a corpse in the latrine, or a body stuffed down the sewer line. Now and then a roll call turned up someone short, and the POW’s would seem to be uneasy, talking and muttering in small groups.

[...]

The new chief honchos, or head knockers, met daily with the guards, and began to demand things.

To their delight, they were never disappointed.

They asked for whitewash, and got it. Soon, pretty rock designs of Chinese, Korean, and U.S. flags adorned the compound yards. They asked for record players, paper, ink, mimeograph machines, and work tools.

Because the U.N. Commission felt it was good therapy to let them work, they got everything they asked for, at U.S. expense.

There was no appropriation for extra barbed wire, or for more compounds to case the crucial housing shortage, which made the existing compounds so large as to be almost unmanageable. But there was money for sheet metal, saws, hammers, and nails for the prisoners, who went studiously to work, making things. Some of the items they made they buried underneath the floors of their huts before the Americans had a chance to admire them.

[...]

During this period, Major Gregory noticed that the population of Koje-do, aside from the POW’s, was increasing. More and more Koreans showed up, to get jobs as servants, houseboys, laundrymen, barbers. The U.S. payroll, after the manner of such rolls, continued to increase geometrically each month. In Colonel Fitzgerald’s HQ there were more Koreans than GI’s.

[...]

The POW press turned out more and more newssheets, flooding the island. Many began to turn up in Pusan, as the paper ration was increased. One evening Major Gregory found one in his quarters. He asked his houseboy what it said.

He was told, “Oh, the Communists are telling the people what fools the Americans are.”

When the Korean War began, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), the United States had no experience handling hostile prisoners of war:

It had developed no real doctrine; it had trained no personnel. And worse, the United States Army understood Asians imperfectly, and Communists not at all.

When the thousands began to flow into the POW cages in Korea, U.S. authorities were certain of only one thing: they did not want to bring almost 100,000 Orientals to the homeland for detention. The prisoner-of-war compounds on Koje-do were born of expediency. And like so many measures so adopted in the modern age, the temporary solution became permanent. Once rid of the POW’s, General Ridgway, and his successor, Van Fleet, never wanted them back.

[...]

Cold, hungry, and apathetic, the POW’s sat in the fields, and waited. They gave no trouble. They expected to be badly used, after the way of all captives in the Orient. At the best, they expected to wear their lives away in labor battalions, slaving for their captors. At the worst, they expected to be shot.

[...]

The inescapable Anglo-Saxon sensitivity to race — all the captives belonged to the colored races — tended toward a certain overcompensation on the part of the American guards. It was not enough to stress that the POW’s were human beings, to which there could be no argument; it must be brought out that they were fully equal human beings, which was debatable.

[...]

Nobody asked Colonel Fitzgerald, however, the approved method by which democracy was taught, which was probably just as well. As it turned out, the method seemed to consist in giving the POW’s anything they wanted. As Bill Gregory put it: “We told ’em we’re here to serve you. If you want anything, you let us know, boy. We’re going to show you what democracy means. You’re all damn fools to be Communists — you do the way we do, and you’ll be living on top of the world.”

[...]

The POW’s were furnished books on democracy, and copies of the United States Constitution. That took care of the theory, for those who could read.

For the rest of it, tons of athletic equipment, much of it abandoned by U.S. units in Pusan, were shipped in. A new hospital was built, with sick call daily. North Korean and Chinese doctors treated the POW’s; these men were allowed all the drugs and medicines they desired.

Mess halls were constructed. The POW’s own cooks worked in stone and baked clay kitchens, with new Korean utensils. They were given more rice, fish, and vegetables than nine-tenths of them had seen in their lifetime.

They were inspected for cleanliness and health by a special Medical Sanitation Company.

They were given new clothing, some of which, like socks, they didn’t know how to use.

Because most of the U.S. supply of fatigue uniforms had been diverted to surplus sales and relief work around the world and now with a new war were scarce, the POW’s were issued new officers’ pinks and greens, straight from QM depots. Each man received new boots and a clean mattress cover.

Major Gregory saw many men inside the barbed wire walking about in better uniforms than he owned. American officers had to pay for their uniforms, and Bill Gregory had a family in the States.

The current hysteria over “domestic terrorists” is often compared to incidents in Nazi Germany, Steve Sailer notes, but a better analog might be the Wilson administration’s demonization of German-Americans in 1917:

When the U.S. declared war on Germany in April 1917 (despite Wilson having been reelected five months before on the slogan: “He kept us out of the war”), the Wilson administration launched a propaganda and censorship campaign to castigate antiwar dissent as treason and potential insurrection.

Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917 to imprison Americans for crimes of “insubordination.”

The Sedition Act of 1918 doubled down, proscribing up to twenty years’ imprisonment for publishing disloyal language about the government of the United States. Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs was imprisoned for a speech outlining the anticapitalist critique of war until President Harding pardoned Debs and invited him to the White House.

We didn’t have tech monopolies back then to censor free speech for us for free, so the Postmaster General was instructed to block from the mails any document questioning American involvement.

By June 1917, many Americans remained unenthusiastic about the war, so the Wilson administration switched from promoting the war as a high-minded crusade for democracy and peace (“the war to end all wars”) to stoking anti-German ethnic hatred. Propaganda posters declaring “Destroy This Mad Brute: Enlist” portrayed the German Reich as a mad gorilla raping a lovely American redhead.

This push by the powers-that-be inspired a sudden Teutophobic cultural revolution as Americans rushed to display their newfound loathing for all things German. Sauerkraut was renamed liberty cabbage, dachshunds became liberty hounds, and, strangely, German measles were redubbed liberty measles.

In Cincinnati, pretzels were canceled from bars’ free lunches. Literary works printed in German were discarded by libraries and there was an occasional book burning.

The Goethe statue in Chicago was vandalized and it was debated whether to melt it down for war weapons.

A German-born baker was lynched in Illinois by coal miners and the jury acquitted his murderers.

At the more refined end of society, 29 musicians of the Boston Symphony Orchestra were rounded up and interned at Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia. Beethoven and Bach disappeared from concert schedules and the German Richard Wagner was replaced by the Frenchman Hector Berlioz.

As in 1939, it was hard to keep up with the rapidly changing political line. For example, a movie mogul who produced a patriotic silent film extolling the American Revolution of 1776 suddenly found his film vilified for being against the King of England.

By the time America finally calmed down under Harding’s “return to normalcy,” German-Americans had learned to keep their heads down. Restrictions on immigration passed in the 1920s helped American society mature. Hence, the challenges of the Depression and WWII were navigated with less of the national nervous breakdown that accompanied Wilson’s second term.

The Wilsonian forced assimilation of Germans proved helpful during World War II when German-Americans were overwhelmingly loyal. But the U.S. probably permanently lost some of the brilliance of German culture.

Looking back, the whole episode seems embarrassing.

Korea was the kind of war, T. R. Fehrenbach says (in This Kind of War), that since the dawn of history was fought by professionals — by legions:

It was fought by men who soon knew they had small support or sympathy at home, who could read in the papers statements by prominent men that they should be withdrawn. It was fought by men whom the Army — at its own peril — had given neither training nor indoctrination, nor the hardness and bitter pride men must have to fight a war in which they do not in their hearts believe.

The Army needed legions, but society didn’t want them. It wanted citizen-soldiers.

[...]

No one has suggested that perhaps there should be two sets of rules, one for the professional Army, which may have to fight in far places, without the declaration of war, and without intrinsic belief in the value of its dying, for reasons of policy, chessmen on the checkerboard of diplomacy; and one for the high-minded, enthusiastic, and idealistic young men who come aboard only when the ship is sinking.

The other answer is to give up Korea-type wars, and to surrender great-power status, and a resultant hope of order — our own decent order — in the world. But America is rich and fat and very, very noticeable in this world.

It is a forlorn hope that we should be left alone.

The Army could have fought World War III in 1950, T. R. Fehrenbach says (in This Kind of War), but it could not fight Korea:

As a case in point, take the experiences of one platoon sergeant in Fort Lewis, Washington. During the big war he had held sway over a platoon of seventy-two enlisted men. The platoon was his to run; the officers rarely came around the barracks.

The platoon sergeant was a reasonable man, in charge of reasonable men, who knew why they were in the Army. Their average age was thirty-two; one-fourth of them, roughly, were college trained. Almost all of them were skilled, in one trade or another.

This kind of man cannot be made to dig a six-by-six hole to bury a carelessly dropped cigarette, nor double-timed around the PX on Sunday morning.

The platoon sergeant relieved a multiple-striped young idiot — as he termed the man — who tried just this. The platoon, as platoons can, ruined the former sergeant.

The new platoon sergeant told his men the barracks needed cleaning, but if everyone would cooperate, each man clean his own area each day, he could get a few men off detail to clean the common areas, such as the latrine, and there need be no GI parties.

The platoon cooperated. There were no GI parties, no extra details. A few men went off the track, now and then; the older men of the platoon handled them quietly, without bothering the platoon sergeant.

This was discipline. Ideally, it should well up out of men, not be imposed upon them.

The platoon prospered. It won the battalion plaque for best barracks so often it was allowed to keep the plaque in perpetuity.

Even after VJ-Day, every man fell out for reveille, promptly, because the platoon sergeant explained to them this was the way the game was played. And the platoon was proud of itself; every man knew it was a good outfit, just a little better than the next.

Then, one by one, the men went home, as the war ended.

The platoon sergeant now was promoted to first sergeant, six stripes, an enlisted god who walked. He got a new company of several platoons, all filled with the new, callow faces entering the Army to be trained.

The war was over, and every man coming in knew it.

The first sergeant, wise now in the ways of handling men, as he thought, carefully explained to the newcomers that the barracks must be cleaned, but if everyone would cooperate, each man clean his own area each day, there would be no GI parties, and there would be passes.

On Saturday the barracks were dirty.

The sergeant, who thought that men needed only to understand what was required to obey, carefully explained what he wanted. Friday, with a great deal of hollering, shouting, and horseplay, the new men cleaned the barracks.

On Saturday, the barracks were still dirty, and the captain made a few pointed remarks to the sergeant.

The sergeant got everyone together, and told them how it was going to be. These men on the mops, these men on the brooms, these men with the lye soap. No hollering or sloshing of water or horseplay — just clean the goddam barracks.

It took most of Friday night, and the men had to stay in the latrines to clean their rifles, but they cleaned the barracks. A few of them got out of hand, but there were no older hands who could — or would — hold them in check. The sergeant handled each of these himself.

The platoon prospered, but it wasn’t easy, particularly on the sergeant. Gradually, he came to realize that seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds, mostly from the disadvantaged areas of society, had no feeling of responsibility to the Army or to the Republic for which it stood. They were not self-disciplined, and they tended to resent authority, even more than the college men and skilled artisans he had commanded before. Probably some had resented their parents; definitely most resented the sergeant, even as most of them, back in their home towns, had instinctively resented the police.

There is no getting around the fact that cops and sergeants spoil your fun.

The platoon prospered, as a sort of jail, until someone wrote to his congressman. After that the captain spoke to the sergeant, telling him that it was peacetime and that perhaps the real purpose of an Army was not to learn to use the bayonet, but to engage in athletics and take Wednesday afternoons off.

The sergeant, now a confused young man with six stripes who walked, left the Army, and graduated from college. If the Army was going to hell, it was a lot more pleasant to watch it go to hell from the Officer’s Club than from the Orderly Room.

A decade after Korea, the military traditionalists still grind their teeth. The sociologists still keep a wary eye on them. Both still try to use the Korean battleground, and its dreary POW camps, to further their own particular myths of human behavior.

Probably, both are wrong.

It was perfectly understandable, T. R. Fehrenbach says (in This Kind of War), that large numbers of men who served (in World War 2) didn’t like the service:

There was no reason why they should. They served only because there had been a dirty job that had to be done. Admittedly, the service was not perfect; no human institution having power over men can ever be. But many of the abuses the civilians complained about had come not from true professionals but from men with quickie diplomas, whose brass was much more apt to go to their heads than to those of men who had waited twenty years for leaves and eagles.

In 1945, somehow confusing the plumbers with the men who pulled the chain, the public demanded that the Army be changed to conform with decent, liberal society.

The generals could have told them to go to hell and made it stick. A few heads would have rolled, a few stars would have been lost. But without acquiescence Congress could no more emasculate the Army than it could alter the nature of the State Department. It could have abolished it, or weakened it even more than it did — but it could not have changed its nature. But the generals could not have retained their new popularity by antagonizing the public, and suddenly popularity was very important to them. Men such as Doolittle, Eisenhower, and Marshall rationalized. America, with postwar duties around the world, would need a bigger peacetime Army than ever before. Therefore, it needed to be popular with the people. And it should be made pleasant, so that more men would enlist. And since Congress wouldn’t do much about upping pay, every man should have a chance to become a sergeant, instead of one in twenty. But, democratically, sergeants would not draw much more pay than privates.

And since some officers and noncoms had abused their powers, rather than make sure officers and noncoms were better than ever, it would be simpler and more expedient — and popular — to reduce those powers. Since Americans were by nature egalitarian, the Army had better go that route too.

[...]

The so-called “caste system” of the Army was modified. Captains, by fiat, suddenly ceased to be gods, and sergeants, the hard-bitten backbone of any army, were told to try to be just some of the boys. Junior officers had a great deal of their power to discipline taken away from them. They could no longer inflict any real punishment, short of formal court-martial, nor could they easily reduce ineffective N.C.O.’s. Understandably, their own powers shaky, they cut the ground completely away from their N.C.O.’s.

[...]

Now an N.C.O. greeted new arrivals with a smile. Where once he would have told them they made him sick to his stomach, didn’t look tough enough to make a go of his outfit, he now led them meekly to his company commander. And this clean-cut young man, who once would have sat remote at the right hand of God in his orderly room, issuing orders that crackled like thunder, now smiled too. “Welcome aboard, gentlemen. I am your company commander; I’m here to help you. I’ll try to make your stay both pleasant and profitable.”

This was all very democratic and pleasant — but it is the nature of young men to get away with anything they can, and soon these young men found they could get away with plenty.

A soldier could tell a sergeant to blow it. In the old Army he might have been bashed, and found immediately what the rules were going to be. In the Canadian Army — which oddly enough no American liberals have found fascistic or bestial — he would have been marched in front of his company commander, had his pay reduced, perhaps even been confined for thirty days, with no damaging mark on his record. He would have learned, instantly, that orders are to be obeyed.

But in the new American Army, the sergeant reported such a case to his C.O. But the C.O. couldn’t do anything drastic or educational to the man; for any real action, he had to pass the case up higher. And nobody wanted to court-martial the man, to put a permanent damaging mark on his record. The most likely outcome was for the man to be chided for being rude, and requested to do better in the future.

[...]

In their neat, fitted uniforms and new shiny boots — there was money for these — the troops looked good. Their appearance made the generals smile.

What they lacked couldn’t be seen, not until the guns sounded.

There is much to military training that seems childish, stultifying, and even brutal. But one essential part of breaking men into military life is the removal of misfits — and in the service a man is a misfit who cannot obey orders, any orders, and who cannot stand immense and searing mental and physical pressure.

For his own sake and for that of those around him, a man must be prepared for the awful, shrieking moment of truth when he realizes he is all alone on a hill ten thousand miles from home, and that he may be killed in the next second.

The young men of America, from whatever strata, are raised in a permissive society. The increasing alienation of their education from the harsher realities of life makes their reorientation, once enlisted, doubly important.

[...]

Orders in combat — the orders that kill men or get them killed, are not given by generals, or even by majors. They are given by lieutenants and sergeants, and sometimes by PFC’s.

When a sergeant gives a soldier an order in battle, it must have the same weight as that of a four-star general.

Such orders cannot be given by men who are some of the boys. Men willingly take orders to die only from those they are trained to regard as superior beings.

[...]

The Old Army, outcast and alien and remote from the warm bosom of society, officer and man alike, ordered into Korea, would have gone without questioning. It would have died without counting. As on Bataan, it would not have listened for the angel’s trumpet or the clarion call. It would have heard the hard sound of its own bugles, and hard-bitten, cynical, wise in bitter ways, it would have kept its eyes on its sergeants.

It would have died. It would have retreated, or surrendered, only in the last extremity. In the enemy prison camps, exhausted, sick, it would have spat upon its captors, despising them to the last.

It would have died, but it might have held.

[...]

The trouble is, different men live by different myths.

There are men who would have a society pointed wholly to fighting and resistance to Communism, and this would be a very different society from the one Americans now enjoy. It might succeed on the battlefield, but its other failures can be predicted.

But the infantry battlefield also cannot be remade to the order of the prevailing midcentury opinion of American sociologists.

[...]

Over several thousand years of history, man has found a way to make soldiers out of this kind of man, as he comes, basically unformed, to the colors. It is a way with great stresses and great strains. It cannot be said it is wholly good. Regimentation is not good, completely, for any man.

But no successful army has been able to avoid it. It is an unpleasant necessity, seemingly likely to go on forever, as long as men fight in fields and mud.