The Cold War Turns Hot (Part Two)

Although tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union began to increase the moment the Germans were defeated in 1945, the Cold War truly began with the North Korean communist party’s invasion of South Korea on 24 June 1950. The Korean peninsula had been under Japanese military occupation since 1910, but with Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War it was divided into halves by the Soviets in the north and the United States and Britain in the south. Predictably, the Soviet half was ruled by a ruthless Communist who fought with the Russians at Stalingrad, named Kim Il Sung, while the south under American control was ruled by an equally ruthless capitalist, Syngman Rhee. Both rulers sought to unify their country politically and economically under their respective political philosophies. Sung’s army was by far superior to Rhee’s; many of the North Korean officers were actually Chinese communist commanders fresh off of their defeat of Chiang kai-Shek’s Nationalists only several months earlier and eager to spread the revolution to all of Korea. The South was nowhere near as battle hardened; most of its leaders has spent their lives comfortably in the United States and instead relied heavily on American aid. North Korea not only possessed the advantage in military experience over its southern counterpart, it also was the recipient of the latest hardware from the Soviet Union, like the feared T-34 tank, regarded as one of the deadliest tanks of WWII. The south, by comparison, was ill equipped to wage a modern tank battle over a front as long as its border with the north, nor was it capable of matching with the revolutionary zeal of the Korean communists and their Chinese allies. None of this was lost on Truman and his advisors; as far as they were concerned, Korea was a lost cause politically and its territory had no strategic value on the military side. As we will see later on, the same assessment was later made of South Vietnam, and for the same reasons that Vietnam eventually became an American battlefield despite the prevailing wisdom advising a contrary course of action, so too did Americans go to fight in a land considered strategiacally unimportant. Why then, did they fight?

The answer is to be found in origin of the Second World War. The men of the Truman administration still vividly remembered how the failure to confront Hitler’s armed takeovers of small neighboring states led to a cataclysmic global war. Coming only five years after the end of WWII, Kim Il Sung’s invasion of the South appeared to represent a similar attempt by Communism, directed from Moscow, to take advantage of the West’s desire for peace and absorb its neighbors into a gigantic Communist empire. President Truman was determined not to have a repeat of appeasement under his watch, deciding instead to oppose what he and his advisors were sure was an attempt by Moscow and Beijing to take over Asia. The truth was something quite different; Rhee had himself repeatedly threatened to invade the North, so often that American officials decided its best policy was to limit Rhee’s access to advanced American weaponry, lest he be tempted to initiate a forceful unification of his own. On the Communist side, Soviet leader Josef Stalin was less than enthusiastic for Sung’s proposed invasion, telling Sung when he made a pilgrimage to Moscow that “if the Americans begin kicking your teeth in, I will not help you”(Stalin had a way with words). Stalin eventually authorized a secret air war against the Americans after US aircraft attacked (“accidentally”) a Soviet air base near the North Korean border, but eventually called a halt after having second thoughts about the potential consequences of direct involvement. Stalin was primarily concerned with rebuilding Soviet economic strength, not starting a war with the United States only five years after Russia’s devastating war against Germany.

China, however, was a different story; Mao put his fully support behind the Korean communists’ attempt to unify Korea and kick out the Americans. When McArthur pushed to far into North Korea, Mao sent Chinese troops into Korea to save the reeling communists from complete collapse, explaining at one point to Stalin that in order to keep the “American Invaders” from running rampant in the Far East (Asia), “We must be prepared for the US to declare and enter a state of war with China.” For Mao, American soldiers killing Korean communists right on the Chinese border posed a serious threat to the revolution he had just won in China after twenty some odd years of civil war. His former nemesis Chiang Kai-Shek enjoyed strong support by the Republican Party and continued to plot under American protection on the island of Formosa (now Taiwan, which is why Taiwan is not an official part of PDRC, it is/was the last stronghold of non-Communist China. In case you were wondering). Macarthur made no secret of his desire to take his army strait through Korea on into Beijing and put an end once and for all to Asian communism; Mao had only to read a newspaper to learn of this. The point of all this is not that Mao was valiantly defending his revolution from outside aggression, after all he supported the initial North Korean invasion that brought Macarthur to his doorstep, but rather to illustrate China’s considerable influence on the evolution of the Cold War. The early phases of the Cold War were actually very hot wars against primarily an Asian, not Russian, communist power: China.

America’s war in Korea set the tone for the next thirty years of the Cold War. Before the war, Truman’s requests for more defense spending met stiff resistance from an isolationist Congress, but after North Korea’s invasion, legislators essentially gave a blank check to cover any costs associated with defending the world from communism. The American defense budget skyrocketed to almost World War Two levels, never to return to its once humble percentage of American taxes. The American military state we recognize today had its origins in the Korean conflict. The war also alarmed the American public to the dangers, real and perceived, of the communist threat to the capitalist world, leading to an almost mass hysteria during the 1950s, most notably the communist persecutions of Senator Joe McCarthy and investigations into allegedly disloyal college professors across America. Most importantly for the purposes of explaining America’s eventual involvement in the Vietnam War, Korea greatly increased tensions between newly Communist China and the United States. The specter of Communist China spreading its roots throughout the fertile soil of decolonizing Asia continued to haunt American administrations well past the end of the Korean conflict in 1953, with terrible consequences for the people of Vietnam and neighboring Cambodia.