US-CHINA: QUEST FOR PEACE

This article appeared in AToL on June 9, 2004

Under pressure to produce a document as quickly as possible, members of the Policy Section began to work late at night on August 10. They discussed possible surrender zones, the allocation of American, British, Chinese and Soviet occupation troops to accept the surrender in the zone most convenient to them, the means of actually taking the surrender of the widely scattered Japanese military forces, and the position of the USSR in the Far East. They quickly decided to include both provisions for splitting up the entire Far East for the surrender and definitions of the geographical limits of those zones.

The chief of the policy section, colonel Charles H Bonesteel, had thirty minutes in which to dictate Paragraph 1 to a secretary, as the Joint Staff Planners and the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee were impatiently awaiting the result of his work. Bonesteel thus somewhat hastily decided who would accept the Japanese surrender. His thoughts, with very slight revision, were incorporated into the final directive. Bonesteel's prime consideration was to establish a surrender line as far north as he thought the Soviets would accept. He knew that Soviet troops could reach the southern tip of Korea before American troops could arrive. He knew also that the Soviets were on the verge of moving into Korea, or were already there.

The nearest American troops to Korea were on Okinawa, 600 miles away. Bonesteel's problem therefore was to compose a surrender arrangement which, while acceptable to the Soviets, would at the same time prevent them from seizing all of Korea. If they refused to confine their advance to North Korea, the US would be unable to stop them. Thus the subsequent existence of South Korea was essentially the result of Soviet good will.

At first, Bonesteel had thought of surrender zones conforming to the provincial boundary lines. But the only map he had in his office was hardly adequate for this sort of distinction. The 38th Parallel, he noted, cut Korea approximately through the middle. If this line was agreeable to president Harry Truman and to the Soviet leader, generalissimo Joseph Stalin, it would place Seoul and a nearby prisoner of war camp in American hands. It would also leave enough land to be apportioned to the Chinese and the British if some sort of quadripartite administration became necessary. Thus he decided to use the 38th Parallel as a hypothetical line dividing the zones within which Japanese forces in Korea would surrender to appointed American and Russian authorities.

The US Joint Chiefs of Staff telegraphed the general order to general MacArthur on August 14 and directed that he furnish an estimated time schedule for the occupation of a port in Korea. Among the items it specified, General Order No 1 stated that Japanese forces north of the 38th Parallel in Korea would surrender to the Russian commander, while those south of the parallel would surrender to the commanding general of the US expeditionary forces.

As Washington waited for Moscow's reaction to president Truman's message, there was a short period of suspense. Russian troops had entered Korea three days before the president accepted the draft of General Order No 1. If the Russians failed to accept the proposal, and if Russian troops occupied Seoul, brigadier general George A Lincoln, chief of the strategy and policy group, suggested that American occupation forces move into Pusan. Stalin replied to Truman on August 16,1945, saying nothing specifically about the 38th Parallel but he offered no objection to the substance of the president's message.

The new dividing line, about 190 miles across the peninsula, sliced across Korea without regard for political boundaries, geographical features, waterways, or paths of commerce. The 38th Parallel cut through more than 75 streams and 12 rivers, intersected many high ridges at variant angles, severed 181 small cart roads, 104 country roads,15 provincial all-weather roads, eight better-class highways, and six north-south rail lines. It was, in fact, an arbitrary separation, symbolic of the unnatural notion of two Koreas. South of the 38th Parallel, the American zone covered 37,000 square miles and held some 21,000,000 people.

North of the line, the USSR zone totaled 48,000 square miles and had about 9 million people. Of the 20 principal Korean cities,12 lay within the American zone, including Seoul, the largest, with a population of nearly 2 million. The American zone included six of Korea's 13 provinces in their entirety, the major part of two more, and a small part of another. The two areas, North and South Korea, complemented each other both agriculturally and industrially. South Korea was mainly a farming area, where fully two-thirds of the inhabitants worked the land. It possessed three times as much irrigated rice land as the northern area, and furnished food for the north. But North Korea furnished the fertilizer for the southern rice fields, and the largest nitrogenous fertilizer plant in the Far East was in Hungnam. Although North Korea also had a high level of agricultural production, it was deficient in some crops. The political barrier imposed serious adverse effects on the natural symbiosis of the divided zones.

South Korea in 1940 produced about 74 percent of Korea's light consumer goods and processed products. Its industry consisted of some large and many small plants producing textiles, rubber products, hardware and ceramics. Many of these plants had been built to process raw materials from North Korea.

North Korea, a largely mountainous region contains valuable mineral deposits, especially coal. Excellent hydroelectric plants, constructed during the last 10 years of Japanese domination, ranked with the largest and best in the world. Because of its power resources, North Korea housed almost all of Korea's heavy industry, including several rolling mills and a highly developed chemical industry. In 1940, North Korea produced 86 percent of Korea's heavy manufactured goods. The only petroleum processing plant in the country, a major installation designed to serve all of Korea, was located in the north, as were seven of eight cement plants. Almost all the electrical power used by South Korea came from the north, as did iron, steel, wood pulp and industrial chemicals needed by South Korea's light industry.

Sharp differences between North and South had traditionally been part of the Korean scene. South Koreans considered their northern neighbors crude and culturally backward. North Koreans viewed southerners as lazy schemers. During the Japanese occupation, Koreans in the north had been much less tractable than those in the south. Differences in farming accounted for some of the social differences in the two zones. A dry-field type of farming in the North opposed a rice-culture area in the South to produce marked variations in points of view. In the South were more small farms and a high tenancy rate, while in the North larger farms and more owner-farmers prevailed.

All of those economic and cultural differences the 38th Parallel promised to exacerbate.

In this famous address to Congress on March 12, 1947, known as the Truman Doctrine Speech, president Truman stressed the moralistic duty of the US to combat totalitarian regimes worldwide. His speech specifically called for US$400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey, both of which he considered to be threatened by communist insurrections as a result of British withdrawal. Congress responded to Truman's appeal by allocating both the requested financial aid and US troops to administer postwar reconstruction.

The Truman Doctrine eventually led to the Marshall Plan, spending $13 billion (out of a 1947 GDP of $244 billion or 5.4 percent) to help Europe recover economically from World War II and to keep it from communism. The most significant aspect of the Marshall plan was the US guarantee of US investors in Europe to exchange their profits in European currencies back into dollars. This established the dollar as the world's reserved currency and laid the foundation for dollar hegemony for over half a century. In the same speech, to justify the high cost of combating communism in Europe, Truman said: "The United States contributed $341 billion toward winning World War II."

Today, the US spends about $400 billion a year, or 4 percent of its of GDP, on its defense budget, not counting the open-ended cost of the Iraq War and occupation so far. All in all, if the US were to spend 4 percent of its GDP annually on foreign economic aid, US security might well be better enhanced.

Professor Bruce Cumings of the University of Chicago has pointed out that declassified Soviet documents do not support the existence of any plan by North Korea of a wholesale invasion of the South, only a limited military operation to seize the Ongjin Peninsula - jutting southward from the 38th Parallel on Korea's west coast, reachable from the South only by sea or by an overland route through North Korean territory. This is where the Korean War conventionally dated from June 25, 1950, began, and where fighting between the South and North began on May 4, 1949, in a battle started by the South, according to the most reliable accounts.

According to Soviet documents, Kim Il-sung first broached the idea of an operation against Ongjin to Soviet ambassador T F Shtykov on August 12,1949. This came on the heels of the biggest Ongjin battle of 1949, initiated on August 4 by the North to dislodge South Korean army units holding Unpa Mountain, a salient above the 38th Parallel which the South had attacked in a previous battle. The coveted summit commanded much of the terrain to the north. The North sought, in the words of the American commander of the Korean Military Advisory Group (KMAG) "to recover high ground in North Korea occupied by [the] South Korean Army." Before dawn, it launched strong artillery barrages and then at 5:30 am, 4,000 to 6,000 North Korean border guards attacked the salient. They routed the South Korean defenders, destroying two companies of Republic of Korea soldiers and leaving hundreds dead.

Virtual panic ensued at high levels of the South Korean government, leading President Syngman Rhee and his favored high officers in the army to argue that the only way to relieve pressure on Ongjin was to drive north to Chorwon - which happened to be about 20 miles into North Korean territory. Rhee, who began his political career by forming a government-in-exile in Nationalist Shanghai, was meeting in a southern Korean port with Chiang Kai-shek [Jiang Jieshi] on forming an anti-communist military alliance.

He returned immediately to Seoul and dressed down his defense minister for not having "attacked the North" after the Ongjin debacle. The American ambassador and the Korean Military Advisory Group commander both intervened, since an attack on Chorwon would lead to, in the words of the latter, "heavy civil war and might spread". The South did not move against Chorwon, but attacks from both sides across the 38th Parallel on the Ongjin peninsula continued through the end of 1949.

Professor Cumings wrote: "All this is based on unimpeachable American archival documentation, some of which was reproduced in the 1949 Korea papers of the Foreign Relations of the US and which I treated at length in my 1990 book. When we now look at both sides of the Parallel with the help of Soviet materials, we see how similar the Soviets were in seeking to restrain hotheaded Korean leaders, including the two chiefs of state. Indeed, two key Soviet Embassy officials seeking to restrain Kim used language almost identical to that which John Foster Dulles used with Rhee in his June 1950 discussions in Seoul (both, upon hearing Kim or Rhee declaim their desire to attack the other side, 'tried to switch the discussion to a general theme', to quote from document No 6). We see that Kim Il-sung, like southern leaders, wanted to bite off a chunk of exposed territory or grab a small city - all of Kaesong for example, which is bisected by the 38th Parallel, or Haeju city just above the Parallel on Ongjin, which southern commanders wanted to occupy in 1949-50."

The issue of socialist world revolution had been settled by the Stalin-Trotsky dispute before World War II, with Stalin's strategy of "socialism in one country" accepted as official Soviet policy. Stalin never expected the Chinese communists to gain control of China and urged them to cooperate as a minority polity with the Kuomintang (KMT). This Soviet posture fit with general Marshall's attempt to forge a coalition government in post-war China. But the march of history made irresistible throughout the oppressed world the struggle against Western imperialism, a dilapidated system weakened by two world wars of inter-capitalist rivalry.

Much of the national bourgeoisie in colonized nations, co-opted for over a century into the role of submissive compradors, after World War II took up the banner of defending capitalism, under the wing of a new economic imperialism emanating from the US to replace collapsing European colonial empires. This new imperialism smeared indigenous anti-imperialist struggles as part of a fantasized centrally directed world communist revolution that fueled justification for the Cold War. The Cold War was America's pretext to inherit the Franco-British empire, which Germany tried twice to seize without success. Reactionary nationalist leaders such as Chiang Kai-shek and Syngman Rhee used anti-communism as a ticket to get US financial and military aid to advance their own agenda.

From 1945 to 1950, the Soviets repeatedly avoided confrontation with the US. Soviet conditions required a long period of peace for the reconstruction of the war-decimated Soviet economy. Soviet policies assigned indigenous communist struggles in the colonial world the role of fending for themselves with their own meager resources, with only moral support from the USSR, seasoned with practical constraints based on geopolitical realpolitik. Stalin's priorities were essentially local and practical: he was determined that the outcome of the war must provide absolutely dependable arrangements for the geopolitical security of the Soviet state in the form of a classical sphere of influence, an understanding he had reached with president Roosevelt, both hoping the US-USSR war-time alliance would continue into peace-time mutual acceptance of separate spheres of influence. Both camps saw their separate ideology as a necessary basis for the security of their separate domestic political survival.

Under Truman, in response to indigenous liberation struggles in former European empires, the US turned away from a bipolar regional sphere of influence, the principle by which the Kremlin expected to exercise political influence over its immediate neighbors - and instead favored a universal approach that gave the West a pretext to meddle in the Soviet sphere in the name of freedom. The US policy of containment then turned into a reactionary global strategy against social progress in the name of anti-communism. The notion of a Soviet strategy for socialist world revolution was entirely the paranoid fantasy of National Security Council Report 68, furnished as a counterpoint pretext for US global hegemony.

Since imperialist expansion violates the American self-image, the US invariably must demonize its targets of aggression, with charges such as "axis of evil" in order to link nations deemed obstructively hostile to US imperium, such as Iraq, Iran and North Korea - nations that otherwise have no military alliance or even political similarity. Two new major post-war US allies, Germany and Japan, former adversaries in the war against fascist militarism, were nurtured into what society would have become if fascism had won the war and eventually normalized its excesses. And this is clearly shown by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the talented and insightful post-war German filmmaker, in his thought-provoking productions.

Evgueni Bajanov, director of the Russian Foreign Ministry's Institute for Contemporary International Problems, studied recently declassified Soviet archives and wrote in his article: "Assessing the Politics of the Korean War, 1949-50," that Stalin was worried about an attack from South Korea, and did everything to avoid provoking Washington and Seoul. Through 1947-48, Soviet leaders still accepted the possibility of an eventual unification of Korea under a dominant South, and refused to sign a separate friendship and cooperation treaty with North Korean leader Kim Il-sung. In the beginning of 1949, the Soviet embassy in Pyongyang began to alert the Kremlin to the growing number of violations of the 38th Parallel by South Korean police and armed forces. On February 3,1949, Soviet ambassador to North Korea Shtykov bitterly complained that the North Koreans did not have enough trained personnel, adequate weapons and sufficient numbers of bullets to rebuff intensifying incursions from the South.

Receiving Kim Il-sung in the Kremlin on March 5, 1949, Stalin showed an open concern about growing pressure from the opponent in the vicinity of the 38th Parallel and emphatically told Kim: "The 38th Parallel must be peaceful. It is very important."

After Kim's return to Korea, the situation did not improve. On April 17,1949, Stalin warned his ambassador of an imminent attack from the South. The Soviet ambassador confirmed that a large-scale war was being prepared by Seoul with the help of Americans and raised alarm about the inability of North Korean troops to withstand the aggression. In May-August 1949, the Kremlin and Pyongyang continued to exchange data about a possible attack from the South. The USSR was clearly afraid of such an attack, and was nervous not knowing how to prevent the war. Stalin repeatedly castigated ambassador Shtykov for failing to do everything in his power to maintain peace on the 38th Parallel.

While Stalin tried to prevent a full-scale civil war in Korea in 1949, the North Korean leadership increasingly put pressure on the Kremlin, demanding support to continue the civil war to liberate the South as a matter of ideological imperative. On March 7,1949, while talking to Stalin in Moscow, Kim Il-sung said: "We believe that the situation makes it necessary and possible to liberate the whole country through military means."

The Soviet leader disagreed, citing the military weakness of the North, the Soviet-US agreement on the 38th Parallel, and the possibility of American intervention. Stalin added that only if the adversary attacked Pyongyang could they try military reunification by launching a counterattack. "Then," Stalin explained, "your move will be understood and supported by everyone."

On September 11,1949, Stalin ordered a new appraisal of the situation in Korea, sending instructions to the Soviet embassy in Pyongyang to study the military, political and international aspects of a possible attack on the South. The embassy gave a negative view on the matter on September 14, and on September 24 the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Central Committee Politburo rejected the North Korean appeal to start an all-out civil war, concluding that the North Korean army was not prepared for such an attack militarily, that "little has been done to raise the South Korean masses to an active struggle," and that an unprovoked attack by the North "would give the Americans a pretext for all kinds of interference into Korean affairs".

At the same time of the exchange of cables between Moscow and Pyongyang, Mao Zedong, in his new status as leader of China, was visiting the Soviet capital. Stalin discussed with Mao the Korean situation, but according to all available data the Soviet leader never mentioned to his Chinese guest any decision to support a full-scale civil war, nor his invitation to Kim Il-sung to come to Moscow. Kim and his delegation spent most of April 1950 in the Soviet Union. The first issue on the agenda was the ways and methods of unification of Korea through military means. Thereafter, Stalin gave his approval to an all-out civil war and outlined his view on how the war had to be prepared.

Stalin did not consult Mao in advance of his decision because he wanted to work out the plans for the long-range unification of Korea without Chinese interference and objections, and then he would present Beijing with a fait accompli, which Mao would have no choice but to accept as a given fact, and assist. While in Moscow, Mao insisted on the liberation of Taiwan, for which Soviet help on the nearly non-existent Chinese navy was necessary, but Stalin reacted negatively to the idea. It would have been hard for Stalin to convince Mao in Moscow to help the Koreans reunify their country before the Chinese had completed the reunification of their own country. Also, Korea was more critical to Soviet security than Taiwan.

China had been involved in working out revolutionary unification strategy in Korea by the late 1940s. Mao supported Kim's desire to liberate the South on principle and even promised to help with troops eventually if necessary. However, Mao recommended patience, to wait until the Chinese completed their own revolutionary civil war. In the beginning of May 1949, Kim Il-sung had meetings with Chinese leaders. Mao warned Kim not to advance to the South in the near future. He cited the unfavorable situation in the world and the preoccupation of China with its own civil war. Mao recommended postponing a full-scale civil war in Korea until all China was reunited under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.

After Kim's April 1950 visit to the USSR, of which declassified records showing Mao as knowing nothing, Stalin authorized the Soviet ambassador in Beijing to tell the Chinese leadership the following: "Korean comrades visited us recently. I'll inform you shortly about the results of our conversations." Simultaneously Kim Il-sung requested a visit to Beijing to execute Stalin's instructions: to continue with civil war plans only if China supported the idea. On the eve of the visit, Kim said to the Soviet ambassador that he did not intend to ask anything from the Chinese since "all his requests had been met in Moscow."

In April 1950, leaders of the guerilla movement in the South arrived in Pyongyang to work out a program of action for before and after the full-scale civil war. On May 12, 1950, Kim Il-sung informed the Soviet ambassador that his General Staff had already started to plan the operation. Pyongyang wanted to start the campaign in June but was not sure that preparations could be completed by that time. By the end of May, the armaments that had been promised by Stalin arrived and the plan of a full-scale civil war was ready. Kim insisted on commencing action in June, not in July as Soviet advisers preferred, arguing that large-scale preparations could be detected by the South; and that in July, rain would slow the advancement of troops.

While making final preparations for the full-scale civil war, the North continued proposing initiatives on the peaceful unification of Korea as a last effort. Initially, the North wanted to strike at the Ongjin peninsula, but at the last moment the strategy was changed. It was believed that Seoul had learned about the pending attack and had beefed up its defenses of Ongjin. The North Koreans now sought Moscow's support for operations along the whole border. The final period, May-June 1950, before the attack is not well documented in Soviet materials declassified to date, and additional research in the archives by historians is required to get a clearer and more detailed picture of the final preparations for the war.

Some evidence suggests that the North had originally wanted merely to stop repeated hostile incursions from the South, but the unanticipated rapid collapse of the South Korean military in the early days of the campaign led the North to change its strategy to an all-out war of hot pursuit to take control of the entire peninsula - a task it had not planned to undertake originally and for which it did not have proper logistic support. Accordingly, the North's advance south ran out of steam after US intervention and turned into disastrous disarray after the US landing at Inchon three months later.

While China supported Korean reunification as a general principle, Chinese leaders were distressed and offended by the fact that the North Koreans did not consult with them and did not pay heed to their advice of caution. On July 2, 1950, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai in a conversation with Soviet ambassador N V Roshchin complained that the North Koreans had underestimated the probability of American military intervention, ignoring Mao's warnings against adventurism back in May 1949 and 1950. Zhou passed on Mao's advice to the North Koreans to create a strong defense line in the area of Inchon, because American troops could land there.

In Chinese history, an expeditionary campaign to Korea in the 7th century by Tang dynasty forces had landed at Inchon with great success. The Chinese leadership feared landing operations by Americans behind North Korean lines in other parts of the Korean peninsula as well. In this conversation, Zhou confirmed that if the Americans crossed the 38th Parallel, Chinese troops of Korean ethnicity would engage the opponent. Three Chinese armies, 120,000 men in total, had already been concentrated in the area of Mukden, known as Shengyang, in Manchuria as a contingency. Zhou inquired if it would be possible to cover these troops with Soviet air support. On July 20, North Korean troops captured Taejon, taking US major general William Dean prisoner. On July 29, Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese Nationalist leader on Taiwan, offered to send 33,000 soldiers to Korea, but the UN, under US control, declined the offer, as that would bring the Chinese civil war into Korea.

According to Roy E Appleman of the Center of Military History, US Army, (South to the Naktong, North to the Yalu), MacArthur's daring landing at Inchon was based on intelligence reports that the enemy, as a result of unanticipated battlefield success in the drive south, had neglected his rear. The information added that the North's military advance was dangling on a thin logistical thread that could be quickly cut in the Seoul area, that the enemy had committed practically all his forces against the US Eighth Army in the south, and had no trained reserves and little power of recuperation.

MacArthur stressed strategic, political and psychological reasons for the landing at Inchon and the quick recapture of Seoul, the capital of South Korea. It would capture the imagination of Asia, restore US prestige and win support for the UN Command, he argued. MacArthur pointed to a huge wall map and told a planning conference - in order to overcome Navy doubts based on difficult tidal conditions at Inchon - that Inchon would be the anvil on which the hammer of lieutenant general Walton H Walker's Eighth Army from the South would crush the North Koreans.

The Navy was apprehensive that tides in the restricted waters of the channel and the harbor must have a maximum depth of 33 feet. World War II landing craft that were to be used required 23 feet of tide to clear the mud flats, and the Landing Ships with Tank (LSTs) required 29 feet of tide - a favorable condition that prevailed only once a month over a period of three or four days. The narrow, shallow channel necessitated a daylight approach for the larger ships. Accordingly, it was necessary to schedule the main landings for the late afternoon high tide. A night approach, however, by a battalion-sized attack group was to be made for the purpose of seizing Wolmi-do during the early morning high tide, a necessary preliminary to the main landing at Inchon itself.

MacArthur and his planners had selected September 15 for D-day because there would then be a high tide giving maximum water depth over the Inchon mud flats. Tidal range for September 15 reached 31.2 feet at high and minus 0.5 feet at low water. Only on this day did the tide reach this extreme range. No other date after this would permit landing until September 27 when a high tide would reach 27 feet. On October 11-13, there would be a tide of 30 feet. Morning high tide on September 15 came at 0659, forty-five minutes after sunrise; evening high tide came at 1919, twenty-seven minutes after sunset. The Navy set 23 feet of tide as the critical point needed for landing craft to clear the mud flat and reach the landing sites.

Another consideration was the sea walls that fronted the Inchon landing sites. Built to turn back unusually high tides, they were 16 feet in height above the mud flats. They presented a scaling problem except at extreme high tide. Since the landing would be made somewhat short of extreme high tide in order to use the last hour or two of daylight, ladders would be needed. Some aluminum scaling ladders were made in Kobe, Japan, and there were others of wood. Grappling hooks, lines and cargo nets were readied for use in holding the boats against the sea wall. All considered, it was an uncommonly daring operation and its success was a testimony to the excellence of the US military.

Air strikes and naval gunfire raked Wolmi-do and, after this three rocket ships moved in close and put down an intense rocket barrage. The landing crafts straightened out into lines from their circling and moved toward the line of departure. Just as the ship's loud speaker announced: "Landing force crossing line of departure," MacArthur came on the bridge of the Amphibious Force Flagship USS Mt McKinley. It was 0625. The first major amphibious assault by American troops against an enemy since Easter Sunday, April 1,1945, at Okinawa was under way. About one mile of water lay between the line of departure and the Wolmi-do beach. The US X Corps expeditionary troops arriving off Inchon on September 15 numbered over 70,000 men.

On September 6, the US daily intelligence summary included a report of the Nationalist Chinese Ministry of Defense G-2 on Taiwan that if the war turned against the North and moved into Northern territory, elements of marshal Lin Piao's Chinese Fourth Field Army probably would be committed by Beijing. This report further indicated that such troops would not be used as Chinese units but would be integrated into the North Korea People's Army. The US Far East Command learned in mid-September of an alleged conference in mid-July in Beijing where it was decided to support North Korea - short of war. Premier Zhou was quoted, however, as having said that if the North Koreans were driven by US forces back to the Yalu, Chinese forces would enter Korea.

US Far East Command intelligence, in commenting on this report, said that the Chinese communist authorities apparently were worried over Korea and would regard a US advance to the Yalu as a "serious threat to their regime". In a little more than a week, MacArthur's troops were in the capital, Seoul, and they had cut off the bulk of the North Korean forces around Pusan.

On September 27, the US Joint Chiefs ordered MacArthur to destroy the enemy army and authorized him to conduct military operations north of the 38th Parallel. On October 7, US troops crossed the Parallel. The same day, the UN General Assembly approved, 47-5, an American resolution endorsing the action. On the last day of September, the daily intelligence summary reported on an alleged high-level conference in Beijing on August 14, at which it had been decided to provide 250,000 Chinese troops for use in Korea.

In general, Moscow and Beijing held convergent views on the strategy and tactics of the war, until the US landing at Inchon, when the perspective in China started to change. In a conversation with Soviet ambassador Roshchin on September 21, premier Zhou stated that there were those in China who worried that the Korean War would drag on and would require costly sacrifices on the part of China. China's authorities provided Soviet intelligence with information showing Kremlin policy in Korea in a bad light.

At one point, Moscow was informed by Beijing that the British consul in the Chinese capital had reached the conclusion that the USSR and the US had colluded in Korea, trying - with the help of the war there - to prevent China from liberating Taiwan, completing the civil war and becoming a power in Asia. (Roshchin cable to Moscow, July 13, 1950, Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii AVP RF). In the 1970s, during the Sino-Soviet split and US-China rapprochement, Taiwan played its Soviet card by trying to develop a rapprochement of its own with the USSR.

Harvard historian and Russian specialist Adam Ulam concluded that Soviet support for the attack on South Korea was not to gain control over South Korea, "a negligible prize, certainly not worth the risk incurred in authorizing the operation". Instead, Ulam suspected that Stalin could have foreseen that Washington would protect Taiwan should war break out in Korea, and that Mao, faced with the possibility of a renewed civil war on the mainland, would thus require Soviet support.

"It is difficult to resist the conclusion that the Korean imbroglio was instigated by the Russians for the specific purpose of discouraging the Chinese Communists from breaking away from Soviet tutelage," Ulam wrote. (The Communists: The Story of Power and Lost Illusions: 1948-1991 (New York and Toronto: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992), 81-82).

On October 1,1950, Stalin came to the conclusion that China had to come to the rescue of the collapsing North Korean defense. On that day he sent an urgent message to Mao and Zhou asking them "to move to the 38th Parallel at least 5-6 divisions in order to give our Korean comrades a chance to organize under the protection of your troops' military reserves to the north of the 38th Parallel." Stalin added that Pyongyang was not informed of this request. It did not take Mao long to respond to Stalin's cable, declining on the ground that Chinese troops were not strong enough and a clash between China and the US would ruin Beijing's plans for peaceful reconstruction and could drag the USSR into a war with Washington. Instead, he suggested that the North Koreans accept defeat and resort to guerrilla tactics.

Stalin, notwithstanding earlier signals to the US of no direct Soviet intervention in Korea, tried to convince Beijing that the US would not dare to start a big war and would agree on a settlement on Korea favorable to the socialist bloc. Under such a scenario, China would also solve the Taiwan issue. He added that even if the US provoked a big war, "let it take place now rather than a few years later, when Japanese militarism will be restored as an American ally, and when the United States and Japan will possess a military spring-board on the continent in the form of Rhee's Korea."

Stalin informed Kim Il-sung about his attempts to persuade China and called upon the North Koreans "to hold firm to every piece of their land". However, on October 12, 1950, the Soviet leader told Kim that China had refused again and that Korea had to be evacuated. On the next day, however, Stalin had better news: The Chinese, after long deliberation and discussion, had agreed to extend direct military aid to North Korea. Moscow, in exchange, agreed to arm the Chinese troops and to provide them with air cover. However, Soviet supplies of military material to both North Korea and China never matched that provided to South Korea by the US.

According to available sources, it was not easy for Beijing to adopt that military decision. Two members of the Chinese leadership sympathetic to Moscow, Gao Gang, who was in charge of Manchuria, and general Peng Dehuai, finally managed to convince Mao to take their side. Their main argument was that if all of Korea was occupied by the US, it would create a mortal danger to the Chinese revolution. Those who opposed participation, on the other hand, complained about Soviet refusal to participate directly in a conflict initially encouraged by Moscow. Memory was still fresh about the Soviet deal with the Chinese Nationalists to recognize Outer Mongolia's independence in exchange for keeping Chinese communists from entering Manchuria, so that the Soviets could dismantle Manchurian industrial assets for shipping back to the Soviet Union.

The Chinese communists had to fight with captured Japanese remnant 1930s equipment to liberate Manchuria from newly US-equipped Nationalist forces, to whom the Soviets had delivered control of Manchuria after they accepted Japanese surrender. Nationalist troops were airlifted by the US into Manchuria with Soviet concurrence. The Manchurian Campaign turned into the PLA's first victory in conventional warfare in the long civil war. It saw the destruction, surrender or desertion of 400,000 of the KMT's finest troops, together with their newest weapons and armor when the campaign was over. Some even suggested that China should accept the American advance, even risking occupation by the US of Manchuria - because in that case, a war between Moscow and Washington would break out and China could stay away from unneeded trouble or even be the balancer of power.

On October 3, 1950, China's then foreign minister, Zhou Enlai, summoned Indian ambassador Sardar K M Panikkar in Beijing and told him that if US or UN forces crossed the 38th Parallel, China would send troops to defend North Korea. He said this action would not be taken if only South Korean troops crossed the 38th Parallel, as China would not interfere with the Korean civil war. This information was communicated quickly by the Indian ambassador to his government, which in turn informed the US and the UN.

Washington immediately dispatched the message to general MacArthur in Tokyo. Representatives of other nations reported similar statements coming from Chinese officials in Beijing. Then, on October 10, Beijing Radio broadcast a declaration of Chinese intentions in a statement to the same effect. On October 15, the US Department of the Army informed MacArthur's headquarters of another report from a reliable source that Moscow was preparing a surprise for American troops when they approached the northern Korean border.

Ten days earlier, on October 5, for the first time, US Far East Command intelligence listed the number one priority in terms of enemy capabilities as being the "Reinforcement by Soviet Satellite China". But this estimate did not long remain its first priority; it dropped to second place the next day, to third place on October 9, and remained there through October 13. On October 14, the intelligence estimate again raised the reinforcement of North Korea to first priority. There it remained during the Wake Island Conference between president Truman and general MacArthur.

The US Far East Command daily intelligence summary for October 14 carried a lengthy analysis of the problem and presumably represented the official view of major general Charles A Willoughby, Far East Command G-2. This intelligence estimate accepted a total strength of 38 Chinese divisions in nine armies in Manchuria, which Chinese refer to as the Northeast, or dongbei. The region borders Inner Mongolia to the west, Russia to the north and North Korea to the east, and is comprised of Jilin, Heilongjiang and Liaoning provinces. The intelligence report expressed the view that the USSR would find it convenient and economical to stay out of the conflict and let the Chinese provide the troops if there was to be intervention.

It went on to say that the interest of all intelligence agencies was focused on the "elusive Lin Piao" and the Yalu River. One significant paragraph stated:

"Recent declarations by CCF (Chinese Communist Forces) leaders, threatening to enter North Korea if American forces were to cross the 38th Parallel, are probably in a category of diplomatic blackmail. [Italics supplied.] The decision, if any, is beyond the purview of collective intelligence: it is a decision for war, on the highest level; i.e. the Kremlin and Peiping [Beijing]. However, the numerical and troop potential in Manchuria is a fait-accompli. A total of 24 divisions are disposed along the Yalu River at crossing points. In this general deployment, the grouping in the vicinity of Antung is the most immediately available Manchurian force, astride a suitable road net for deployment southward."

This same report pointed to the recent fall of Wonsan as a serious loss to the enemy and one jeopardizing his entire defense structure. It went on to say: "This open failure of the enemy to rebuild his forces suggests that the CCF and Soviets, in spite of their continued interest and some blatant public statements, have decided against further expensive investment in support of a lost cause."

Meanwhile, President Truman on October 10 had announced his intention to fly to the Pacific for a meeting with General MacArthur over the coming weekend to discuss "the final phase of UN action in Korea." The conference between the President, General MacArthur, and selected advisers of each took place on Wake Island, Sunday, October 15. Most of the talk concerned plans for the rehabilitation of Korea after the fighting ceased.

General MacArthur said he expected formal resistance to end throughout North and South Korea by Thanksgiving Day and that he hoped to get the Eighth Army back to Japan by Christmas. In response to President Truman's question, "What are the chances for Chinese or Soviet interference?" official notes of the conference indicate that General MacArthur replied substantially as follows:

"Very little. Had they interfered in the first or second months it would have been decisive. We are no longer fearful of their intervention. We no longer stand with hat in hand. The Chinese have 300,000 men in Manchuria. Of these probably not more than 100,000 to 200,000 are distributed along the Yalu River. Only 50,000 to 60,000 could be gotten across the Yalu River. They have no Air Force. Now that we have bases for our Air Force in Korea, if the Chinese tried to get down to Pyongyang there would be greatest slaughter."

General MacArthur then discussed briefly the chance of Russian intervention, holding the view that it was not feasible and would not take place. He said the Eighth Army would be back home by Christmas.

General MacArthur later challenged the accuracy of the official notes of the conversations at the Wake Island Conference. He maintained that the question concerning possible Chinese or Soviet intervention was low on the President's agenda, and that while he replied that the chances of such intervention were "very little," he added that this opinion was purely speculative and derived from the military standpoint, while the question fundamentally was one requiring a political decision. His view, he stated, was also conditioned by the military assumption that if the Chinese did intervene, US forces would retaliate, and in a peninsular war could create havoc with their exposed lines of communication and bases of supply. He said, in effect, that he took it for granted that Chinese knowledge of this capability would be a powerful factor in keeping them from intervening. Militarily, MacArthur was right: a peninsula war greatly discounts the numerical advantage of large army against a technologically superior smaller force with air superiority.

The statement of Zhou Enlai to the Indian ambassador on October 3, the announcements made over Beijing radio, the timing of Chi