THE END AND THE OUTCOME
Geographically, the Korean War ended just as it began, at the thirty-eighth parallel. For each combatant, the outcome of the three years of intense warfare was different. For North Korea, it was a clear defeat. Their objective of annexing South Korea had not been attained. The North Korean army had been defeated; their capital city, Pyongyang, had largely been destroyed; and more than three hundred thousand North Korean soldiers had been killed or were missing in action.
Communist China’s end position can only be considered a draw. Flexing their muscles in a show to the world of their new military might, the Chinese entered the war to rescue a Communist ally, North Korea, and to demonstrate that China would not tolerate any military threat near its borders. The result was that the Chinese Communists suffered losses of more than 420,000 killed or missing, and in the end were unable to defeat the U.S.-led United Nations forces, even though fighting adjacent to their own borders. In the end, China was forced to accept an armistice that simply reflected the status quo ante. The failure of 120,00 °Chinese to defeat the 25,000 Marines of the 1st Marine Division, surrounded at the Chosin Reservoir, was especially demoralizing to the Chinese leaders.
For the United States, the outcome was not unfavorable. In my view Korea was a limited victory, but, then, it was a limited war. It was certainly not a defeat. The Americans did what they intended to do: prevent the armed seizure and annexation of South Korea by the Communists. In the process, the Americans threw the North Koreans out of South Korea, decimated their army, and then drove the Chinese Communist army out of South Korea to end the conflict on terms acceptable to us.
From the prospect of the United Nations, the war in Korea was a success of historic proportions. For the first time an international peacekeeping body had organized a multinational military force, exercised its command, then successfully reversed the territorial incursions of an aggressor state. Furthermore, the results were lasting. South Korea has not since been attacked or invaded. Historically, the Korean War has become a unique chapter in the annals of modern warfare, setting precedents and providing lessons that have served to guide the formulation of foreign policy and national strategy for the United States throughout the Cold War.
The Korean War was instrumental in defining limited war as a conflict fought under its own unique rules. In Korea, the United States could not fight to win unconditionally. To do so would engulf the United States in a general war with China on the Asian mainland. Nor could the United States lose the war. The nation’s honor and prestige, and leadership of the free world, were at stake.
The war was limited to fighting the Asian Communists. During the entire conflict, NATO forces facing the Soviet Communists in Europe and the North Atlantic had to maintain a posture of readiness and strength to deter a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. The Soviets had available more than one hundred divisions of ground troops and were rapidly modernizing their navy, creating a formidable challenge to the United States, in which the military might and political leadership of NATO reposed.
Mobilization during Korea was limited; “guns and butter” was the policy. The American public was sensitive to casualties, and Congress was concerned about the budget. Tactical operations had to be planned with careful consideration to hold down losses. This often eliminated major operations with a high potential for significant long-term military and political success. Budget pressures limited procurement of ammunition and aviation fuel, resulting in rationing of rounds for artillery bombardments in support of the ground forces, and the marginal readiness of combat aviation units due to too few flight hours.
With the war limited to the Korean peninsula, the concept of politically defined sanctuaries was established. U.S. air operations north of the Chinese border were proscribed by the UN with the consent of the U.S. government. Although locked in combat with the Chinese Communist army, UN air strikes on airfields, logistic bases, and troop-marshaling areas north of the Yalu were forbidden. Even the hot pursuit of Communist aircraft returning to their Chinese bases after combat in Korea was forbidden beyond the Yalu. The United States also had its de facto sanctuaries, but these existed not by political denial but as the result of the air and naval superiority achieved by the United States in the theater of operations. Maritime forces operated with impunity off the coasts of Korea, launching air strikes, conducting shore bombardments, reinforcing troops, and delivering combat logistics, all in support of the UN forces ashore. UN aircraft could fly virtually without concern for hostile fire at altitudes above ten thousand feet over the terrain. This was the upper limit for effective enemy AAA fire, and there were no surface-to-air missiles in North Korea.
U.S. air superiority over all Korea was virtually absolute. U.S. Air Force F-86 North American Sabre fighters flying a barrier combat air patrol in the northwest corner of Korea intercepted Chinese MiG-15s as they crossed the Yalu coming out of their sanctuary bases to provide cover for the UN aircraft conducting air-to-ground interdiction operations to the south.
Korea was the first conflict in which the United States had an operational inventory of nuclear weapons. The world, as well as the American people, were waiting to see how the U.S. policy for the employment of these weapons of mass destruction would evolve. By the time of the Korean War, tactical nuclear weapons had reached yields greater than the Hiroshima bomb. The USSR by then also had the A-bomb. Concern for escalation and the resulting mutual destruction had rendered original policy for the normalization of nuclear weapons impractical. The U.S. policy on the use of “special weapons,” as they were known, hardened, and although the inventory continued to grow in numbers and effectiveness, the requirement for presidential release made it clear that their application would be reserved for those extremis situations in which national survival would be at stake.
There were occasions when field commanders in desperate situations may have contemplated the use of tactical nuclear weapons as an equalizer to limit U.S. casualties in the face of the seemingly inexhaustible Chinese numbers. But the employment of nuclear weapons in Korea was never seriously considered. In another sense, during the Korean War, nuclear weapons played a key role in our national survival. With the United States engaged in a full-scale war in Korea, the USSR could see this preoccupation as a weakness in NATO and an invitation to launch an attack on Western Europe. It was only the persuasion of the United States’ readiness for strategic warfare, constantly displayed by ongoing SAC operations, that served as a powerful deterrent to a Soviet invasion across the East German plains.
As the war in Korea crystallized our policy on tactical nuclear weapons, it conversely drove home the lesson that in the future, U.S. national defense planning must be as much concerned with conventional warfighting as with nuclear deterrence. Nuclear weapons did not deter the war in Korea, nor were they to be employed tactically. In the future, U.S. national security policy would have to be prepared to fight and win conflicts by conventional arms, reserving the nuclear arsenal to deter the escalation of limited wars by the introduction of Soviet military forces. The Communists may have assumed that the United States was not prepared to fight a conventional war in Asia in 1950, but they badly underestimated the national will, the resourcefulness of the United States’ military planners, and the resilience of the American character.