By Andrew Salmon
It is customary today to view China as an economic superpower, to the point where it is the received wisdom that if a company is not represented in the Middle Kingdom, its future is in doubt. But long before China’s economic dragon awoke, a military dragon had released a breath of fire that caused a seismic shift in the regional balance of power, seared the world’s most powerful military force, ensured the survival of one nation and threatened the existence of another.
The world was stunned. For over a century, China had suffered humiliation after humiliation: The Opium Wars, the Sino-Japanese War, and the Boxer Rebellion. The cataclysmic events that eradicated the “Sick Man of Asia” and replaced it with a new superpower took place in the frost-bound mountains of the Korean Peninsula.
It was in winter 1950, that Stalin washed his hands of a defeated and discredited Kim Il-sung, leaving it to Mao’s unheralded legions to strike south of the Yalu. The “Chinese People’s Volunteers” ― actually, regular units of the Peoples Liberation Army ― employing light weapons and guerilla tactics but on a Napoleonic scale, confronted the U.N. Command as it stood poised on the cusp of victory.
For the free world what followed was catastrophe, and for anti-communist Koreans a tragedy, as the U.N. Command’s main force, the U.S. Army, was thrust into its longest, most humiliating retreat.
Researching this series of events from the experiences of Australian and British veterans, as well as South Korean soldiers and civilians caught up in the vortex, has been humbling. Six decades later, memories remain potent.
A retired British soldier was barely able to describe the “scorched earth” retreat in which U.N. troops destroyed all buildings, food, livestock and infrastructure north of Pyongyang: It had, he felt, been like the climax of a James Bond film in which the sets explode and collapse around the hero as he escapes with seconds to spare.
A former Korean general ― an interpreter with U.S. Marines during the Chosin Reservoir campaign ― choked with emotion as he recalled the cruel Via Dolrossa Christian refugees staggered along during their retreat through freezing mountains.
An ex-refugee ― now a grandmother, but a teenager in 1950 ― recalled her terror as, with a bombardment shrieking over her head and Chinese closing in on the city, she and her family waited desperately on the frozen Hungnam docks for a ship to carry her south.
Recounting the carnage in “Hellfire Valley,” a commando veteran flung out his hand to make a point ― sending a cup of tea hurtling across his living room. His wife, engrossed, urged him to continue. She later confided, however, that there would be struggles that night: Discussing the war would bring her husband’s long-suppressed nightmares back to the surface.
But the Korean War is now a distant nightmare, ill-remembered history irrelevant to the 21st century. Surely, the cataclysm could never be repeated. Could it?
As any researcher of the Korean War knows, war must be the absolute final option on the peninsula, for combat in Korea carried not just massive spillover risk of escalation, it was fought with demonic cruelty and hellish intensity.
Today, the U.S. Armed Forces seems unchallengeable: While they may be unable to completely quash insurgencies in Iraq or Afghanistan, it seems unlikely that an enemy could do them crippling damage. Such was not the case in 1950.
The destruction of two U.S. regiments in “The Gauntlet” at Kunu-ri, and the virtual annihilation of a U.S. Regimental Combat Team east of Chosin Reservoir, remain the most traumatic battles U.S. units have undergone since the end of World War II. Not even in the darkest days of Vietnam were large-scale units wiped out.
So searing were those winter months in North Korea, that never again during the war would the U.S. Army undertake a strategic offensive to reunify the peninsula. Indeed, the invasion of North Korea was the first and only invasion of a communist state that the Free World mounted during the Cold War.
Could it happen again? Seen through economic, political or ideological lenses, the answer must surely be “No.” The ideological divisions of the Cold War have largely been sealed; the paranoia of that era has evaporated.
Beijing enjoys a far more trustworthy relationship with Washington than it did in 1950; China is more economically intertwined with the world than at any time in recent history; its economy is capitalist in all but name, its state ideology nowhere near as revolutionary as it was in 1950.
Yet strategic geography ― and the historical vulnerability of China’s northeast flank ― remains unchanged.
In the 16th century, Hideyoshi’s samurai of Japan stormed over the land bridge of the Korean Peninsula in their assault on Ming China. In the 19th century, the first Sino-Japanese War raged over the peninsula. In the 20th century, Imperial Japan used colonial Korea as its jumping-off point to seize Manchuria; from Manchuria, Hirohito’s legions marched into China.
Could it happen again? Given historical experience and North Korea’s strategic location at the crossroads of Northeast Asia, it would be naive to say the risk has completely lifted.
Should Pyongyang implode, a march north by South Korean troops, under the guise of humanitarian intervention or political stabilization, looks feasible. Were Seoul to be assisted by Washington ― even, in some shape or form, by Tokyo ― a threatened Beijing might act.
China’s aging veterans may look with pride on what they achieved in 1950: They liberated an ally, drove a threatening army far from their frontier, humbled the world’s mightiest military and shattered prejudiced global perceptions about their motherland.
But South Korea, while welcoming the economic opportunities that China’s ongoing rise offers, might well ponder the terrible events of 1950. Should unification under the rule of Seoul look imminent, the peninsula could see the dragon’s claws unsheathed once again.
Andrew Salmon is a Seoul-based journalist and author. His new Korean War history, “Scorched Earth, Black Snow: Britain and Australia in the Korean War, 1950,” is published in London today. He can be reached at andrewcsalmon@yahoo.co.uk.