Free The Korean War by Max Hastings Page B

policemen sometimes tortured or killed civilians, if their leaders accepted bribes, if their politiciansbehaved like mafiosi – was not this the way ‘these people’ had always done things? Was it not merely a higher form of Western arrogance to seek to impose Western ideas of humanity upon a society in which dog was a culinary delicacy – customarily strangled and depilated with a pine taper in the course of preparation – and where fried crickets and boiled silkworms featured prominently in local good food guides? The American record in Korea between 1945 and 1950 must be judged against the indisputable reality of Soviet expansionism, of Stalin’s bottomless malevolence. No charge against the Rhee regime can blunt the force of one simple truth: that, while the United States deliberately declined to provide South Korea with the means to conduct armed aggression, the Soviet Union supplied North Korea with a large arsenal of tanks, artillery and military aircraft. The events that unfolded in the summer of 1950 demonstrated that American fears for the peninsula were entirely well founded, whatever the shortcomings of Washington’s political response to these.

 
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    In the course of 1949, relations between North and South Korea, the tempo of mutual propaganda hysteria, rose sharply. In the South, constant military pressure eroded the strength of the communist guerrillas in the mountains. In April 1949, Pyongyang invited South Korea’s anti-Rhee leaders to attend a ‘coalition conference’. Of 545 delegates present, 240 were from the South. Rhee denounced them, not unreasonably, as ‘communist stooges’. In August, a new communist ‘Supreme People’s Assembly’ met in Haiju, just north of the 38th Parallel. At this, a ‘People’s Democratic Republic’ embracing both North and South Korea was announced. A South Korean was its nominated foreign minister. But on the 38th Parallel, responsibility for border incidents was by no means a monopoly of Pyongyang. In May 1949, in one of the most serious incidents, South Korean forces penetrated up to two and a half miles into North Korean territory, and attacked local villages. In a climate of intense mutual mistrust, in December the British Foreign Office asked the War Office for a military assessment of the situation in Korea. It received a sceptical response:
In the past [wrote Major J. R. Ferguson Innes] it has always been our view that irrespective of strengths the North Korean forces would have little difficulty in dealing effectively with the forces of South Korea should full-scale hostilities break out. This somewhat naturally (since they raised, equipped and trained South Korean forces) was not the American view. Recently, however, they have been coming round to our way of thinking regarding the capabilities of the respective forces. . . . On the question of aggression by the North, there can be no doubt whatever that their ultimate objective is to overrun the South; and I think in the long term there is no doubt that they will do so, in which case, as you so aptly remark, the Americans will have made a rather handsome contribution of equipment to the military strength of Asiatic Communism. As to their method of achieving their object, short of World War III beginning, I think they will adopt the well-tried tactics of preparing the country from within rather than resort to open aggression, although ‘frontier incidents’ will doubtless continue.
. . . Regarding American policy, if in fact one exists, towards South Korea, I can only say we know little, and of their future intentions even less . . . Whilst being in no doubt about future North Korean (or Soviet) plans regarding South Korea, we think an invasion is unlikely in the immediate view; however, if it did take place, I think it improbable that the Americans would become involved. The possession of South Korea is not essential for Allied strategic plans, and though it would obviously be