Those Who Have Borne the Battle (24 page)

Even though President Truman had ordered the desegregation of the military in 1948, there were still all-black units. In fact, the black 24th Infantry Regiment conducted itself well in some of the fighting in the summer of 1950, and there were pictures in the press of black soldiers on the front. But pressure was mounting to integrate units. By the end of the war, there were only eighty-eight all-black units; there had been nearly four hundred in June 1950. The draft was also free of racial quotas. In fact, in 1951 about one-quarter of the army recruits, draftees and enlistees, were African American.

It would have been impossible to maintain a segregated force with these numbers unless the army expanded significantly the numbers of all-black units. No one proposed that, and in 1954 the Pentagon ended the segregated units. When General Matthew Ridgway, who would replace MacArthur, was commanding the Eighth Army, he said that it was time to end the practice: “Both from a human and a military point of view, it was wholly inefficient, not to say improper, to segregate soldiers this way.”
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Clearly, the individual rotation system would complicate any efforts to segregate units.

One of the modifications in the Korean War draft was explicitly to permit student deferments. It was not a blanket exemption, but local Selective Service boards were provided more flexibility to defer students. Most boards tended to be supportive of this choice. In November 1951 General Hershey reported that out of 1,259,000 college males who would otherwise be draft eligible, 891,000 had received deferments.
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In the early 1940s about one-third of the enlisted men had been volunteers; this percentage declined as the war went on. In Korea about one-half of the enlisted men volunteered. A consequence of greater student deferments and of more reliance on enlistments was that, unlike World War II, the Korean War was marked by a socioeconomic casualty gap. Casualties tended to be disproportionately from lower socioeconomic areas. This almost inevitably followed from the greater reliance on volunteers.
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There seems little doubt that this casualty gap was intensified by the fact that Korea, even more than World War II, was an infantry war. There were not the heavy casualties among airmen and sailors that had marked the Second World War. Certainly, these latter casualties had been disproportionately from higher socioeconomic groups.

Fighting a war required paying for it. In July 1950 President Truman proposed major new taxes to cover the increased cost of the war. He sought some $10.5 billion in revenue from income and excise taxes as well as a renewed “war profits” tax. There was little disagreement over the principle of raising taxes so that the country could pay for the war. Republican leaders such as Senator Taft and Congressman Richard Nixon, then running for a US Senate seat from California, endorsed the idea. Secretary of the Treasury John Snyder told Congress that some excess-profits tax was essential: “You passed a bill up here to draft boys of 18, to send them to war. I think it is just as important we draft some of the profits to help pay for the expenditures.”
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Congress approved an excess-profits tax and an additional surtax on corporations.

In early 1951 President Truman once again requested new taxes due to the still increasing cost of the war. By this time, the stalemate in Korea, the MacArthur controversy, increased Republican strength in Congress due to the 1950 elections, and growing partisan conflict all complicated
this effort. Lobbying groups pressed hard to protect corporate profits from further taxation and to protect certain products from excise taxes. Lobbyists representing a range of goods, from beer to vacuum cleaners, insisted that their items were critical for the war effort and should not be taxed further.

President Truman as well as congressional leaders from both parties had an aversion to debt as a source of war funding. House Speaker Sam Rayburn said, “I think the boys in Korea would appreciate it more if we in this country were to pay our own way instead of leaving it for them to pay when they get back.”
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Congress did authorize new taxes—although, again, not as much as the president had asked for, and they would refuse to approve any additional taxes during the war. Nonetheless, the Korean War was less dependent upon debt and borrowing than any preceding war. In this regard, Truman's leadership and insistence on paying for the war with taxes would prove decisive.

Not surprisingly, the home-front decisions and debate influenced the attitudes of troops who were in Korea. As servicemen and -women serving there watched the MacArthur controversy play out, as they noted that the strategic goals of the war shifted to negotiating a truce more or less along the lines where the war began and where they now were digging in, as they watched public support for the war decline and saw this manifest itself with more draft exemptions and less willingness to pay taxes, as they observed that the public in the United States paid less and less attention to the war in Korea, it did affect morale and attitudes. Bitterness or cynicism might be too strong as generalizations; nonetheless, these descriptions were not irrelevant, nor were the attitudes totally absent.

For this war, the Pentagon initiated a rotation system whereby troops serving in the theater accumulated “points” based on their activities. Under this program most men served for one year. Individual rotation did provide a clear limit on service, but it was destructive of unit cohesion, likely reduced combat effectiveness, and also led inevitably to charges of individuals calculating how to amass points and reduce risk. Critics of the system argued that the goal now for servicemen in Korea was to survive a tour of duty. “Soldiers were no longer vested in the outcome
of the war, and their attachments to their units and their buddies were degraded.”
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Time
named “GI Joe” as the “Man of the Year” for 1950. This designation by the leading newsmagazine was a well-established ritual; this choice and its description nonetheless underlined some of the irony of the situation. The
Time
editors explained the recognition of this “Man of the Year” in a curious way: “As the year ended, 1950's man seemed to be an American in the bitterly unwelcome role of the fighting-man. It was not a role the American had sought, either as an individual or as a nation. The U.S. fighting-man was not civilization's crusader, but destiny's draftee.”
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There was little that was heroic about this role.

Historian T. R. Fehrenbach served in Korea and later wrote about the war. “In 1950, even to fight an undeveloped nation in Asia, America had to fall back upon her citizens. And in this, above all else, lies the resulting trauma of the Korean War. The far frontier is not defended with citizens, for citizens have better things to do than to die on some forsaken hill, in some forsaken country, for what seems to be the sake of that country.” As one marine lieutenant described it, “Few people back home faced up to the full realization that this was a war. They were too removed from the situation and there was no full mobilization or war effort. . . . As a result, most of us felt we were victims of a forgotten war.”
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Of course, the troops recognized the changes as the war moved to a period of stalemate and negotiation. One soldier who served in Korea in 1952 and 1953 wrote, “For the GI's the general idea was to stay alive. The army wasn't going anywhere, and everyone knew it. There would be no big push to end the war. The name of the game was to hang in there and survive until something happens at the peace talks in Panmunjom. To get killed was to be wasted, and no one wants to be wasted.” And another, “It wasn't like World War II; you knew there was no big push coming, no fighting until the enemy surrendered. This was a war that was going nowhere.”
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A veteran of the war recalled, “I had trouble understanding what we were doing there, trying to fight a draw. I had heard that MacArthur got
bounced because he wanted to use the atom bomb, and in my mind, that's the way war is fought. You try to win. It's hard to keep guys in a fox-hole, risking their lives, and tell them, ‘All we want is a draw.'Why pick me for this kind of work? Get somebody else.” One mother whose son was killed wrote a bitter note to President Truman: “It is murder to send boys to fight with their hands tied by your ‘limited police action.'” She asked, “Have you forgotten how America fights?”
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Another veteran shared the experience of being on a ship with draftees heading for Korea in the spring of 1952: “Some of them made it clear that if it were left up to them there would be no fuckin' war, and they also made it clear that they could find a hell of a lot of other things to do rather than killing people or possibly being killed or maimed for life. Living in muddy holes for the next six months or so wasn't their idea of heroism, and many of them prayed every free minute for God to end the war before they arrived.”
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There were inevitably some feelings of cynicism and bitterness. Martin Russ, who wrote a classic study of the Chosin Reservoir campaign, was in Korea as a young marine. He wrote a few years later about a memorial service he and other marines had attended for their fallen comrades at Camp Guyol in 1953. “A chaplain and a rabbi spoke. Isolated phrases that I remember ‘. . . in glory . . . that they will not have died in vain . . . not forgotten,' etc. None of those men died gloriously. And most of them died in vain. Only the ones that died while saving the lives of others did not die in vain. The most disturbing thing of all is that not one of them knew why they were dying.”
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Bill Mauldin described his observations of the combat soldier in Korea in 1952: “He fights a battle in which his best friends get killed and if an account of the action gets printed at all in his home town paper, it appears on page 17 under a Lux ad. There won't be a victory parade for his return because he'll come home quietly and alone, on rotation, and there's no victory in the old-fashioned sense, anyway, because this isn't that kind of war. It's a slow, grinding, lonely, bitched-up war.”
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James Michener wrote in the
Saturday Evening Post
in May 1952 that he held the troops in Korea to be greater heroes even than those who fought in World War II: “The soldier on Guadalcanal could feel that his
entire nation was behind him, dedicated to the job to which he was dedicated. Civilian and soldier alike bore the burden.” But in Korea, the men “seem to fight in a vacuum, as if America didn't care a damn.”
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In his novel
The Bridges at Toko-Ri
, Michener developed this theme with one of his characters:

When General Matthew Ridgway took over command of the Eighth Army following their bloody battles and withdrawal from North Korea in late 1950, he was struck by the mood in his command. The troops seemed nervous. “There was a complete absence of that alertness, that aggressiveness, that you find in troops whose spirit is high.” He wrote to all of the soldiers in his command, assuring them that their war had a purpose, and it was a purpose that extended far beyond Korea. It may be currently along the Han River, but it could at some point be back in their homes. Ridgway insisted, “This has long ceased to be a fight for freedom for our Korean allies alone and for their national survival. It has become, and it continues to be, a fight for our own freedom, for our own survival, in an honorable, independent national existence.”
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The remarkable thing in many ways was the professionalism and courage that the military forces, including surely the Eighth Army, displayed in the last twenty-eight months of the war when, as the soldiers quipped, “no one wants to die for a tie.” The war would continue for more
than two years while negotiations were under way. Nearly half of all of the United Nations casualties took place during this period.

The US forces fought in long, bloody battles at Honegsong, at Heartbreak Ridge, at the Punchbowl, and at Pork Chop Hill. They engaged with discipline, and they suffered heavy casualties. And they kept fighting, even if they sometimes wondered about the purpose during the period called the “forgotten part of the forgotten war.” Of course, in the field, in combat, soldiers never have much time to think about purpose. They focus on their task, and they focus on their survival.

The treaty talks finally came to be blocked by one fundamental issue—whether prisoners of war would be repatriated if they did not want to go home. There were a number of North Korean and Chinese prisoners who indicated they did not wish to return to their Communist countries. President Truman and his administration were adamant that there could be no forceful repatriation. In the minds of some, the last two years of the Korean War came to be fought over this matter. As scholar Gideon Rose observes, “Rarely in human history has a great power war been fought over such an issue.”
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Some have argued that Truman used the issue of POWs to recast the narrative of stalemate into something more hopeful. Certainly, after the war fell into a phase of stalemated battle lines and stalemated truce talks, it was the case that much of the moral purpose of the war was gone. Historian Steven Casey concluded that the US insistence that men would not be forced back into communism framed the “war in more appealing ideological terms—as a moral crusade fought on behalf of America's traditional respect for human rights, as well as a symbol of the West's appeal to people who were subject to communist tyranny.”
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