Those Who Have Borne the Battle (25 page)

It was a morally defensible position, one that Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson felt strongly about as a result of enduring guilt about some of the Soviet prisoners held by the Germans who were forced to go back to Stalin's Russia in 1945. Morally defensible as it may have been, it was hard to sustain public support for this objective when the costs were so high. In the summer of 1952 more than 70 percent of the Americans responding to a poll said they would not continue to fight the war for this objective; they would return the prisoners.

In the presidential election of 1952, the Republican nominee, Dwight Eisenhower, easily defeated Adlai Stevenson. President Truman did not stand for reelection. During the campaign “Ike” had promised to go to Korea and to work to bring this war to a satisfactory conclusion. He did visit Korea and talked to a number of civilian and military leaders. Some pressed him to initiate a major offensive to push the Chinese back from their fortified positions near the thirty-eighth parallel. The distinguished general saw no strategic outcome that would be worth the cost of doing this: “Small attacks on small hills would not end this war.”
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By April 1953 84 percent of the Americans agreed that the war should be settled. And President Eisenhower reminded people of the cost of the war: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
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In the spring and early summer, UN troops fought a series of bloody battles for control of Pork Chop Hill, near Cheorwon. In the shadow of “Old Baldy,” it was not really a crucial piece of real estate, but the attacks and counterattacks with the Chinese were brutal. The US Army I Corps sustained heavy casualties, but refused to concede anything to the Chinese. On July 11 the UN forces withdrew. They had lost 347 men in this battle, and another 1289 were wounded. It was estimated that 1,500 Chinese soldiers were killed and 4,000 wounded. The sustained fighting there became a symbol for battles with no clear strategic purpose. David Halberstam would describe it as a place that “had no great strategic benefit, and it was only of value because it had been deemed of value and because whichever side held it, the other side wanted it.”
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On July 27, 1953, negotiators at Panmunjom signed a truce. There would not be a forced repatriation. This was not a treaty ending the war, but a truce, and that remains the status of this war. When a reporter asked President Eisenhower if he was concerned about public criticism of the treaty since the last two years of war accomplished so little, Ike snapped, “If the people raise Hell,” you should ask them if they are ready to “volunteer for front-line action in a continued Korean War.”
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As
Life
described the truce, “It was plain that the end of fighting in Korea, at this moment in history, did not promise either surcease from
anxiety or lasting peace. . . . Since there was no real victory, there was no occasion for celebration—no whistles, no cheering, no dancing in the streets. . . . [T]he war itself will be long remembered for its cruelty, horror, pity, frustration and desperate bravery.”
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The prediction was not fulfilled; for most Americans, nothing about the war was long remembered. It remained on the periphery of the national narrative.

 

 

When the Korean War veterans began to return to the United States and receive their military discharges, they encountered a benefit system that was nearly as generous as was the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, the World War II GI Bill. The Readjustment Act of 1952 restricted somewhat the eligibility requirements and did reduce some of the benefits. The unemployment payment, for example, was capped at six months, rather than the year of eligibility that World War II veterans had available to them. Educational benefits were reduced in several categories, as were the terms available for home, business, or farm loans. All of these cuts were the result of tightening up the program administration that had proved a problem after World War II or were aimed explicitly at reducing some of the costs. Despite the public inattention to the war and those fighting it, there was no hostility toward America's troops, and I am unaware of any effort to reduce benefits because the veterans were not valued. They may have been ignored, but they were not faulted for the war or for their conduct of it.

The United States determined in the first year of the Korean War that it would not follow the pattern developed during World War I and World War II of establishing military cemeteries near battlefields to inter and honor the war dead. There would be a UN cemetery in Korea, but there would be no American military cemeteries in Korea: the American dead would be returned to the United States. The only public explanation for this was the distance for family members to travel to visit graves; off the record, some officials expressed concerns about long-term political stability in Korea. A
New York Times
editorial approved: “What place will this peninsula, remote from us and from our normal interests, have in the history of our time?”
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This marginalization of the war, beginning with calling it a “police action,” as well as General Bradley's testimony that this was a “wrong” war, did not build morale. In 1951 the Defense Department decided that since the deceased were part of a police action and not a war, in government cemeteries the markers on their graves would include only their name, rank, and dates of birth and death. Under pressure, officials agreed to include the word
Korea
—but not
War
.

For many years there were no memorials for the Korean War and those who had fought it. One scholar summarized that “the Korean War has mainly been a forgotten war, and there are significantly fewer memorials for it than for any American war in the twentieth century.”
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It is highly likely that there are fewer Korean War memorials than for any other extended American war, regardless of century. Military units sometimes added
Korea
to its existing memorials, and communities did the same. The marker in my hometown of Galena merged Korean veterans and casualties with those from World War II in a memorial created in the 1950s. The United States combined a Korean memorial with the World War II Memorial at the Punchbowl National Cemetery in Hawaii.

A veteran who had lost a leg in Korea remembered when he left the hospital in the United States: “Off the base, it was if there was no war taking place. While very few civilians were consciously rude or offensive, it became quickly evident the man on the street just didn't care. The war wasn't popular and no one wanted to hear anything about it.”
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David Halberstam wrote of the Korean War veterans, “This vast disconnect between those who fought and the people at home, the sense that no matter the bravery they showed, or the validity of their cause, the soldiers of Korea had been granted a kind of second-class status compared to that of the men who had fought in previous wars, led to a great deal of quiet—and enduring—bitterness.”
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In my reading and research and conversations with these veterans, I encountered less bitterness and more resignation. These veterans moved back to their lives and seemed to have little interest in organizing and in reminding people of their services.

A veteran of the Chosin Reservoir campaign remembered a marine band greeting them in San Francisco, but he wrote, “The Korean War is
called the Forgotten War because no one cared about it except the boys or men fighting there. Then we say we won the battle, but lost the war. When we got home, there was no big blowout. Everyone kept quiet. None of the veterans complained. People never knew where Korea was on the map.” Another veteran of the Chosin campaign remembered that when he returned on leave to his home in upstate New York, he was refused entrance to the VFW club because he was not a veteran of a “war.”
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In 1954 Congress redesignated Armistice Day, November 11, the national holiday established to honor those who fought and died in World War I. It now was Veterans Day, honoring those who had served in all wars. The specific focus then was on including World War II and Korean War veterans.

Only in 1991 did the Korean veterans receive their parade in New York City. Nine thousand of them marched, and an estimated quarter of a million watched along the parade route. This was a few months after some millions of people had turned out for a parade for Gulf War, “Operation Desert Storm,” veterans. And forty years after General MacArthur had received a massive ticker-tape welcome. As one Queens letter carrier who had served in Korea said to a reporter, “We're finally being recognized. This was long overdue.” A Long Island insurance investigator who was a Korean War veteran said, “I guess it was an unpopular war. It wasn't considered a war, just a police action. But to the fellows who were there, it was a war, and we're here not for us but for the guys we left in Korea.”
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At the end of the war, for many, the “guys we left in Korea” had another meaning, an uncertain one. At the time of the armistice, there were still several thousand American servicemen listed as “missing.” Over the next few years, nearly all of these would be reclassified as “killed in action,” even though most of their remains were not located and identified. Some spoke darkly of others, as many as 3,000, according to General Mark Clark's estimate in the summer of 1953, still in hidden prison camps in North Korea or China. Within a few months this number of missing had been reduced to 944—and the inability to explain their fate fed into tales
of communist treachery and American softness. Americans had little experience dealing with wars that ended with truce rather than conclusion, especially a truce in which much of the contested territory—and the suspected prison camps—was under hostile control.

Ironically, a greater issue developed that related to those who did survive in prison camps. There were 3,746 American prisoners of war who were repatriated in the prisoner exchange at the conclusion of hostilities. Some had been released earlier. Twenty-one Americans declined repatriation and stayed in Communist China or North Korea. Most of them would finally come to the United States or to Europe. The fact that they originally declined to return was shocking, “the only time in history that American captives have chosen not to return home because they preferred the enemy's form of government to their own.”
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This, critics suggested, affirmed a larger set of problems—the effectiveness of Communist propaganda and “brainwashing,” on the one hand, and the absence of moral and physical toughness on the part of too many Americans, on the other. The latter seemed the greater problem, “the result of some new failure in the childhood and adolescent training of our young men—a new softness.”
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The returning prisoners were burdened with allegations that as many as one-third of them had been “collaborators.” Richard Condon's 1959 thriller
The Manchurian Candidate
and the 1962 movie based on this book described the sinister consequences of this allegation.

In 1955 President Dwight Eisenhower issued an executive order providing for a new “Code of Conduct” for members of the armed forces. All servicemen and -women pledged to never surrender to an enemy as long as they had the will to resist. They had to commit to try to escape if captured. They needed also to swear never to do anything that would harm other prisoners, that would divulge any information to the enemy, or that would constitute disloyalty to the United States.
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There was little evidence that American prisoners conducted themselves dishonorably during the Korean War. The story of weak Americans cooperating with a canny and sinister enemy fed easily into the fear of communism and allegations of American weakness that marked the 1950s. In fact, the prisoners resisted collaboration and did not have their heads turned to communism. They survived. Or some did. Of the 7, 190
captured by North Koreans or Chinese, 2,730 died in captivity. Fewer than 700 escaped. The highest death rate was in the first year of the war, when the North Koreans were in charge of the camps. Allegations of disloyalty were heavy burdens to lay upon the survivors. And they became part of the overlay on this war that Americans sought to forget.
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In 1982 some veterans organized a Korean War Veterans Association. When I asked one of the early leaders why they had waited so long, he quipped that the veterans had been part of a “forgotten” war, so they also tried to forget. When they did organize, it was to provide an occasion for a reunion with friends from a faraway war. In October 1986 Congress authorized planning for a Korean War Veterans Memorial to be constructed on the National Mall, across the reflecting pool from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which had been dedicated in 1982. The Korean War Veterans Memorial was dedicated in 1995. The committee that planned it was composed of veterans of the war, and they chose not to include there the names of the dead, as the Vietnam Memorial did.

The Korean War memorial is about a sharing of experience. Nineteen figures, seven feet tall, imposing but not monumental, human rather than statuesque, move across a field. They bear the cautious expressions of men in combat. One of the leaders in this project, retired army colonel William Weber, who lost a leg and part of an arm in Korea, said, “It's not a memorial of grief. It's a memorial of pride.” Weber believes citizens in the United States have always been sheltered from the real nature of war. “Gruesome photographs are censored; everybody dies a heroic death. Well they don't all die a heroic death, but their deaths can be worth something, as this memorial makes clear.”
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The inscription at the memorial reads: