SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY

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SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY

SUBSTITUTE

FOR

VICTORY

By John Dille

DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC., Garden City, N.Y., 1954

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CART* NUMBER 545359

COPYRIGHT, 1954, BY JOHN DILLE

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES

AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N1Y-

JBTRST EDITION

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I

THE WAR IN KOREA was a good war. It was more than
that: it was a magnificent war. It had to be fought. And con-
sidering the odds we faced the tremendous distances over
which we had to transport men and guns, the overwhelming
disadvantage of standing precariously on a small, narrow
peninsula and fighting virtually uphill against a mainland
Asiatic power it was fought exceedingly well.

At the same time, the truce which brought the war to a halt
if only temporarily was a wise and a necessary step. There
was no point at the time in our attempting to push any

8

farther. The cost, especially in lives, would have far out-
weighed the gains. We had attained our original objective,
that of building a wall against Communist aggression; the
war was becoming increasingly unpopular at home; and there
were sound and compelling military reasons for stopping it
where we did.

There is no real guarantee, of course, that the enemy will
not resume the battle. There is no doubt that we left a good
deal of unfinished business. And it is difficult for us to under-
stand and accept the combination of non-victory and non-
defeat which Korea amounts to.

Nonetheless, there is nothing about the Korean war for
which we should feel ashamed.

Perhaps no war in our history has been so fully reported
and at the same time so little understood as was the Korean
war. Platoons of reporters were deployed across the front by
their papers and news agencies. To keep the copy and the
potential headlines flowing toward home these men phoned
their stories direct from front-line command posts to rewrite
men in Seoul much as police reporters call in to the city desk
on a newspaper. The rewrite men shared billets with Eighth
Army briefing officers, and with this professional advantage
they kept the bulletins and the war yarns moving over the
wires to Tokyo and the U.S. in a constant stream. Radio
circuits were set up nightly so that network broadcasters
could drive back to Seoul from the front and go on the air
with fresh, hot-off-the-bunker accounts of a battle, a soldier's
heroism, a jet pilot's exploits that afternoon in MIG Alley.
Photographers roamed the front, dodging enemy artillery
barrages alongside the soldiers, so that readers at home could
see with their own eyes what the war was like. Name col-
umnists went out to lend the war the prestige of their by-
lines, and vice versa.

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Yet, despite all this attention, the meaning of the Korean
war got lost somewhere in a sea of confusion and disillusion-
ment. It became a political issue, a shuttlecock for competing
pundits, and a ready-made challenge to armchair strategists.
It became a kind of disembodied war, in which even the men
who died in it seemed to be at times not so much flesh-and-
blood heroes as statistical arguments for one political view or
another. In an election year this was both inevitable and
understandable. Before the campaigns ever began, the war
was a confusing mess. And then, as the war became identified
more and more as a political issue, it ceased to exist clearly in
the public mind as a war at all, as a clear-cut matter of geo-
graphic realities and military facts. It ceased to make sense.

I do not mean to imply that the folks at home did not
appreciate the efforts of their men in Korea. I am sure they
cared deeply; and, considering the remoteness of the war and
its seemingly fruitless ups and downs, I marvel that they sus-
tained the interest they did. One can read an overwritten,
blood-and-guts news item to the effect that "Hordes of fresh
Chinese troops last night attacked game but battle-weary
U.N. forces'* on just so many consecutive mornings without
going into breakfast-table shell shock. I often wondered, as
I read these accounts in Korea, how many readers in the
commuting trains back home were discriminating or skeptical
enough to ask themselves, as they put down their papers:
"How many hordes do you suppose there are in a platoon?"

Even the constant reader, beset daily by a bewildering
array of charging hordes, casualty lists, and all the compli-
cated -minutiae of the Panmunjom agenda to relate in his own
mind, one to another, must have felt hopelessly out of touch
with it all But it was not his fault, or tie fault of the press, or
even of the politicians, that the Korean war became such an
enigma. It was in the nature of the war itself and, in fact, its

10

fate that it should have been misunderstood. For it was a war
of paradoxes.

It began as a police action, in a little-known and faraway
place, with dubious congressional legality and, so far as its
international godfather, the fledgling U.N., was concerned,
under uncertain auspices. And yet before it was over it was
to become a full-scale war, in which nearly 150,000 Ameri-
cans were to become casualties, 25,000 of them to die.

It was the first modern war we have fought with no clear
end in view as we waged it, no known geographical goal at
which someone would blow a whistle and it would all be
over. The shores of Japan were in our sights in that war. In
Europe we knew that when we linked up with the Russians
at the Elbe we could quit and come home. In Korea, ironi-
cally enough, we were pointed roughly in the same direction,
but with a vastly different purpose: we knew that if we ever
linked up with the Russians there we could not quit and
might never come home.

It was also a war of sudden and exasperating surprises.
There were no rules in the military manuals to cover them, no
previous experience to guide us, and, worst of all, no advance
preparation for our problems back in the bustling cities and
on the peaceful farms of the U.S., whence lay our real source
of morale and strength. The men in Korea knew this, and
consequently they often felt they were working in a lonely
vacuum.

I shall never forget one particularly heart-rending day at
the front. The enemy had thrown in a heavy concentration of
mortar and artillery shells just as our men were trying to push
forward in a daylight offensive. Our men were caught in the
open, casualties were high, and morale was sagging. As I
climbed up and down the hills that day no less than a dozen
soldiers spotted my correspondent's patch and came forward

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to beg me to tell the people at home what was going on. "If
they still think this is a damned police action/* said one cor-
poral, pointing at the litter cases being carried down the hill
behind us, "f or God's sake, straighten them out that we ain't
standing on no corner with a billy club and a goddamned
police whistle!" Then he adjusted the carbine which was
slung over his shoulder, rounded up the Korean litter-bearers
he was in charge of, and started up the hill again to pick up
more casualties.

It was a war which, in the very midst of the fighting,
became enmeshed at Kaesong and at Panmunjom in aH the
surrealistic gobbledygook of Communist invective and tri-
lingual bargaining, a maddening game of words which went
on for interminable months like a kind of dissonant counter-
point to the main theme of simple, understandable warfare.
Again, the Americans involved in this case the delegates at
Munsan felt alone and occasionally despondent For it
seemed the Reds were making up all the rules and doing most
of the talking. Our delegates feared the people at home could
not possibly understand. While Nam II snapped at Admiral
Joy, the soldiers went on dying. Back home this must have
seemed intolerably stupid and tragic. Actually, there at the
site of it all, it made tragic sense. For we on the ground knew
we were engaged in a new kind of war, a war of limited
scope, in which our side and the enemy both realized at
about the same time that neither of us could quit or win.
Like chessplayers who have mated each other, we had to
settle for a draw. The reporters who were there knew there
was little they could say, in their daily dispatches, that would
communicate this complicated and frustrating fact to their
readers.

Then, during the long and annoying periods of stalemate,
the war became boring even for the soldiers and the re-

12

porters, for there was nothing new or enlightening they could
get hold of. It must have been terribly boring to read back
home. Unfortunately there was no Mauldin in this war, to
ease the tensions and lift the heart with humor. Even Bill
himself, I'm afraid, would have had serious trouble making
this war seem human or acceptable. It was just not a war you
could chuckle over.

The enemy, whom we had once dismissed vaguely as "the
yellow peril," turned out to be possibly the craftiest opponent
we had ever encountered. As the battle progressed he massed
so much artillery that near the end he had as much as we
did, in some areas more. And he knew how to use it His
mortar crews were so good they could "walk" mortar shells
right down the hill behind you exploding them in mur-
derous patterns.

The enemy had a knapsack full of sly professional tricks,
which he loved to use on us to whipsaw us back and forth
until we became dizzy. Over a period of months, for example,
he "gave" us prisoners including North Korean colonels and
commissars whom we were delighted to get and obligingly
tossed into our bulging POW cages on the island of Koje-do,
hundreds of miles from the front. Then, too late, we f ound
we had been had. In our own rear area, and under our very
noses, the same colonels we had once thought ourselves so
lucky to capture set about organizing an army. It was
equipped with crude weapons made in our own compounds,
and it was so defiant and well led that it engineered a series
of mass prison revolts which stood us right on our ears. The
first revolt occurred in February 1952. When the prisoners
got out of control again the following May, the situation was
devastating enough to cause Tokyo to suppress news of the
break for some forty-eight hours, during which time General

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Ridgway who was the responsible officer but who had just
been appointed to NATO quickly briefed General Clark,
his successor, ordered a four-engine plane, and prepared to
fly to his new assignment in Paris, leaving Clark to hold the
hottest potato he had fondled since the Rapido River episode
in Italy.

We sent a couple of brigadier generals named Dodd and
Colson down to Koje-do to restore order. Dodd proceeded to
get captured in his own camp. And Colson, apparently more
concerned with saving the life of a fellow general than with
maintaining U.S. prestige in Asia, bailed him out. It was a
new low, even for the Korean war. And it underlined, all too
clearly, how unprepared we were, with brains and experi-
ence, for fighting a war so "total" that the enemy could use
our own POWs against us. The knowledge that we had made
fools of ourselves throughout the world did nothing, of
course, to make the Korean war any more palatable or under-
standable at home.

But the cruelest blow of all came when the war refused
even to end properly. Being a perverse war, it could not just
come to a nice, sensible, meaningful conclusion. It had to
end "not with a bang, but a whimper." And as it did so it
found the U.N. in the fantastic position of trying to negotiate,
simultaneously, with an enemy who wanted a truce and with
an ally, Syngman Rhee, who wanted to keep on fighting.
Many people, who were sick of the war and had never
thought it a particularly good idea in the first place, were
swept up emotionally by the pluck and patriotism of Rhee
and found themselves arguing that the war should be con-
tinued for his sake. When Rhee turned loose 27,000 prisoners
we had agreed to hold for a final rescreening, the jigsaw
seemed scrambled for fair. We recovered the fumble (be-
cause the enemy wanted a truce badly enough to forgive us ) .

14

But we were in no mood for further surprises from Korea.
Everyone was fed up. All was confusion. And the war had
lost its last vestige of respectability.

"The tremendous defeat in Korea," Senator McCarthy
called it.

"The only American war that has settled nothing/ 7 said the
Washington Times-Herald, forgetting, for a moment, the
War of 1812.

"There is no substitute for victory," General MacArthur
had said, and his warning was widely repeated, as proof that
the war was a f ailure.

'Tve kept quiet until now," cried Mrs. Georgia Lusk, a
former congresswoman from New Mexico, "but I question
national strategy which causes our boys to fight to the top
of the hill, but not over it"

Well, Mrs. Lusk, the top of the hill is a better position,
militarily, than the vulnerable valley on the other side. And
IVe kept quiet until now too. I did my job as a reporter, and
my editors faithfully relayed my reports. But when all the
reporters and newspapers and magazines have done their
level best to explain the war, when all the facts have been
reported and the readers still seem confused, when ideas like
those above become common currency for lack of any clear
alternative then it is time, perhaps, to go back over the
ground again and try to set the record straight.

I discovered how helpful this might be when, after cover-
ing the war in Korea for two years, I returned to the U.S.
for reassignment and went first to my home town in Colo-
rado for a vacation. One after another, people I knew called
up to ask if I would come over to their church or dub
for a luncheon meeting and talk about Korea. It was clear,
from their questions, that the war lacked perspective. Any-

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thing so frustrating and humiliating as the war in Korea,
they seemed to feel, must have been wrong. And anything so
complicated as the truce we were engaged in to end that war
must be bad. The noisy, unanswered cries of "defeat," "dis-
grace," "failure," and "appeasement** rang in their ears, and
they wanted to know if all this was true.

I told them that I did not happen to think so, and I tried to
tell them why. I suggested it was a little like looking at some-
thing a long way off through the wrong end of a telescope.
I had had the same trouble, I added, trying to keep up with
some of the events here at home. It was not until I came
home and looked at them up dose that they came into focus
and made sense. And so I tried to do the same thing for them
by bringing a few of the lesser-known aspects of the war up
close by turning the telescope about.

My home-town neighbors seemed so relieved when the
meetings adjourned that I decided I ought to pass the tele-
scope around. That is the reason for this book It is a personal
interpretation of the war, as it added up to me, and I submit
it with the sincere hope that perhaps it will allow its readers
and especially the men who fought in Korea to feel a little
better about their war.

They deserve to.

II

THE FIRST THING to know in order to understand the
Korean war is that it was really several wars. That is, it had
several distinct phases, and it was seldom the same kind of
war for more than six months at a time. The enemy had much
to do with this constant shifting of our fortunes. But we had
a good deal of control over it ourselves. La general, and with
only a few exceptions, the war at any given moment was a
reflection of the personality and skill of the U.N. general
in command at that moment.

In the early days, for example, when General Walton

18

Walker was in command, we tried to wage the war by
moving up the roads and establishing lonely strong points
from which to fight back at infiltrating enemy troops. This
was an archaic and futile form of warfare, but under the cir-
cumstances it was the only kind of war we could fight. For
we had to enter the peninsula overnight, in order to block
the enemy, somehow, before he got too far. We could get only
a handful of men there in a hurry, and we were forced, in the
early weeks, to fight a loosely knit, hit-or-miss battle. The
situation was entirely fluid, the terrain cut us off into isolated
strong points, and we could not even begin to build a wall of
men across Korea for months.

General Walker, who as commanding general of the Eighth
Army in Japan an occupation job took the army to Korea
and was its first commander there, had made his reputation
in Europe, where he commanded one of Patton's tank corps.
There, the enemy had been tough. But he had also been fairly
predictable. He was fighting "our kind" of war, and we had
him on flat terrain where it had been possible to use the net-
work of French and German roads to fence him off, one sec-
tion at a time, with tanks and firepower, until we had him
cornered with his back to the Russians. But the Korean war
bore no resemblance to World War II ( in its later, trench and
artillery-duel phase it was more like World War I). There
were almost no good roads in Korea, and it was not good tank
country in the Patton and Walker sense. The little peninsula
(with a population, however, of 30,000,000) was so cut up
with mountains and valleys that it was virtually impossible
to sweep the enemy into a corner. If you were a unit com-
mander, you discovered that by the time you had chased the
enemy from the top of one mountain, where he had been tak-
ing pot shots at you, he would pop up on another peak
nearby. Then, when you sent the rest of your men up there,

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you'd find your rear unprotected. And on the first quiet, rainy
night when you were trying to get some sleep, a company of
North Koreans, wearing canvas sneakers, would come noise-
lessly up the valley between your two "hills, and you would
be lucky if you still had half your men when morning came.

Gradually, however, as we got the 7000-mile pipeline to
Korea in working order and filled it with the men and guns
we needed there, the situation changed for the better. When
I got to Korea, eight months after the war started, guerrillas
still operated in the rear areas, but it was possible to jeep up
to the front lines, sit around in the open with the soldiers,
and even go out on patrol with them without necessarily tak-
ing serious chances. The enemy was there, but he was elusive
and lightly armed. He had almost no artillery at that time
and he was more dangerous for his cunning and for his
sudden fits of ratlike temper than for any real power.

Our own increased firepower proved too much for him, and
when the enemy began to fall back in the winter of 1950,
General MacArthur decided he could extend his original
mission which was to repel aggression by kicking the enemy
back across the 38th Parallel and push him, instead, clear to
the Yalu, thus accomplishing, as a kind of political by-
product, the unification of North and South Korea.

This was indeed a worthy cause. But it was destined, by
its very nature, to run into trouble. We stirred up a hornet's
nest of Chinese, who lived just across the Yalu and took a dim
view of our attempt to press our luck. We might have known
it, but apparently we did not.

At his Wake Island conference with President Truman,
General MacArthur assured the President that the Chinese
would not interfere. And then, not long before the Chinese
struck, he flew to Korea to tell the troops that their war would
be over by Christmas. The Chinese had different plans.

20

Should Mexico ever become politically divided, with the
U.S. deeply interested because of our geographical proxim-
ityin the affairs of northern Mexico, while an enemy of ours
aligned himself with southern Mexico, it might then be clear
to us why the Chinese behaved as they did in the winter of
1951. If Mexico were invaded by an enemy force, the Monroe
Doctrine, of course, would apply and we would come to the
rescue. But let us assume, for the moment, that there was
no such doctrine and that we were faced with the problem
the Chinese faced in the winter of 1951. If an enemy army
were to invade Mexico, we might not take any overt action so
long as he did not come too close to us if, say, he pushed
only as far north as Mazatldn on the Tropic of Cancer and
holed up there, his mission accomplished. But if he were to
proceed on up the peninsula and finally had his troops
wading around in the Rio Grande on our own border, I sus-
pect that Texas, at least Monroe Doctrine or not would be
raring to go to war. And Texas would be right.

The Chinese doubtless felt the same way. We knew, of
course, that we were not about to invade Manchuria. But the
Chinese, who had been conditioned for years by the Russian
fear that the Red world was being encircled, probably made
no such assumptions. It is probable that China was asked to
"volunteer" in the Korean war when Russia discovered that
her North Korean satellite troops were unable to hold their
ground. And they may have been more than willing to
do so. For they certainly gained a great deal from Russia
(jets, arms, technical assistance, and the industrial rehabilita-
tion of Manchuria) in return for their participation. But it is
also probable that the Chinese would have lacked the motiva-
tion to take the fatal and expensive step of attacking us had
we not gone roaring up to t heir Rio Grande and stood there,
virtually thumbing our noses.

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It is even more likely that no enemy in southern Mexico,
hypothetical or otherwise, would make the mistake we made
in Korea. If he were at all experienced in wars he would
have assumed, as he came nearer to our Rio Grande border,
that we would be getting nervous. He would have alerted
his front-line troops for the possibility that they might be
attacked by the Americans. He would be extremely naive if
he left us out of his plans and ignored the eventuality of our
entry into the war altogether. And certainly, if his troops
actually captured some Texans, the enemy commander would
be completely derelict if he scoffed at this new development
and continued to assume he had a clear field for his bravado.

But that, unfortunately, is precisely what happened in
Korea. Our commanders did not foresee the Chinese inter-
ventionor, if they did, they chose to ignore the danger
signals and as General S. L. A. Marshall brilliantly reports
in his book, The River and the Gauntlet 9 our men were not
prepared on our vulnerable front line for such a thing to
happen.

A f eflow correspondent dropped into a U.N. command post
near the Yalu River one night just before the big retreat
and saw a Chinese soldier who had just been captured and
brought in for interrogation. The correspondent had been in
China and so, because the interrogators had not and were
not sure how to proceed, he spent the night giving them a
hand.

Oh yes, the Chinese soldier said, there were quite a few of
his people in Korea. And there were a lot more on the way.

TTie next day the same correspondent attended a briefing
given by General Walker. Someone asked Walker about re-
ports there were Chinese in the war.

Oh no, said Walker. That wasn't so. He wasn't worried
about the Chinese.

22

General MacArthur was not worried either. Not only were
his front-line troops unprepared for their rendezvous with
the Chinese, but he had committed the additional military
indiscretion of splitting his command. Tenth Corps, on the
right flank, was commanded by General Ned Almond, one of
MacArthur's Tokyo staff officers in effect making the corps
a sort of private MacArthur army. General Walker, though
the Army commander in the field, had little or nothing to
say about the disposition of troops on his own right flank.
When the enemy hit, consequently, the divided front came
apart at the seams and much of Tenth Corps had to be evacu-
ated by sea. As a result of this collapse we rolled all the way
back beyond Seoul, where we dug in to collect our wits, and
our men wrote home that they would miss Christmas after
all. It was an unmistakable defeat. Once, when our troops
were falling back, General MacArthur rationalized the rout
by saying it was a good idea, really, to make the enemy run
that far trying to catch up. It extended his supply lines. The
thought occurred to a number of other people at the time, in
a moment of exasperated whimsey of course, that if that were
the case we ought to refine that' tactic and build long ramps
out into the sea. Then we could lure the enemy out even
farther and, when we got him out far enough, push Tiim over-
boardprovided he didn't push us first.

At any rate General MacArthur's explanation served, just
then, as a handy substitute for defeat.

General Ridgway came into the war about this time. And
just in time. With his grenade and first-aid kit bouncing
photogenically on his chest, his piercing eyes burning holes
through everything and everyone he looked at, he roamed the
demoralized front, telling off lax commanders, relieving
frightened ones, putting tired ones out to pasture. "I don't

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 23

want your plans for defense/* was his famous retort to officers
who had fallen into the mood of the time. "I want to see your
plan for attack"

Then Ridgway went out on the roads, where he stopped
convoys heading south and told them to turn around and go
back where they came from. He sent out orders for his troops
to stop fighting just from the roads and the valleys and to get
up on the ridges and hold onto them. Almost singlehandedly
he turned the Eighth Army around, welded it into a solid line,
and pushed it northward again, sweeping the enemy in front
of him. The general even got into the battles himself. Once,
when the 187th Airborne RCT (regimental command team)
was making a parachute drop at Munsan in an attempt to seal
off a segment of the enemy, Ridgway landed in a small plane
before the area was secure and before the airborne com-
mander himself had landed. When the latter, a brigadier
general, finally did drift down in his chute he dropped into a
mud puddle. Somebody reached down to help form up, and
the tardy general was more chagrined than surprised to see
it was the Army commander.

With Ridgway's prodding we got to the 38th Parallel once
again, and across it so we would have a better defensive posi-
tion in case the enemy still wanted to fight, which he did. Once
again the mission to repel and punish aggression against
South Korea was accomplished. And once again General
MacArthur was talking this time in a public argument with
his superiors in Washington about moving on up to the Yalu.
This time, however, he was removed from command, pre-
sumably on one or both of two grounds: (1) that no soldier,
whatever his rank, could practice open insubordination and
get away with it; (2) that even if we were to go to the Yalu
again General MacArthur, because of our earlier debacle up
there, was perhaps not the man best suited to handle the

24

assignment General MacArthur flew home and General
Ridgway went to Tokyo to replace him. It was a fitting
reward for Ridgway's accomplishments in Korea.

When General Van Fleet took command from Ridgway,
we had already gone about as far north as we were to go.
Van Fleet's job was to hold the fort. And he, too, did an
excellent job.

Van Fleet was a big, burly, likable commander. He had no
flair for the dramatic. And I never saw him flustered. The
story of his arrival at the front, which I happened to witness,
explains a good deal about the success he was later to have.

The Chinese were in the midst of their spring, 1951, offen-
sive. Their objective was to be in Seoul by May Day. I had
been to the front the day before or rather almost to the
front. I had to stop to repair a tire at corps headquarters near
Uijongbu, well to the rear of the front lines. And there I
learned that the Chinese had broken through in some sectors
and that they had even succeeded in sneaking patrols be-
tween corps and its divisions to the front and were setting up
roadblocks. A few jeeps had already been ambushed. Some-
one suggested I bunk down at corps for the night rather than
risk going any farther. It was a good idea, and I accepted.

I found a cot in the liaison tent, where officers from adja-
cent and subordinate units lived in order to be on hand for
relaying messages and co-ordinating battle orders. The front
was alive with Chinese attacks and U.N. counterattacks. No
one slept. Throughout the night the liaison officers stuck by
their crackling field radios and telephones, communicating
with a tank battalion here, filtering reports from an infantry
division over there, and trying to ascertain the situation in
other corps areas across the front. It was the best place in
Korea that night to get an idea of what was going on. The

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 25

situation, which, was fairly critical, was not helped any by
a report that caine in from a nearby unit sometime after mid-
night warning us that a band of Chinese who had broken
through were known to be milling around as far back as a
road just west of corps headquarters. Tanks were sent out
to find them.

I felt rather useless and helpless, just sitting on my bunk,
so for lack of anything else to do I put on my pistol belt and
went outside into the dense fog to run an unofficial check on
the command post guards. As I was chatting with an MP we
heard a series of strange, low whistles coming from the fog-
shrouded valley in front of the CP. They seemed too me-
chanical to be sounds of nature. It was not difficult to conjure
up a picture of Chinese cunningly signaling to each other that
they had found the corps command post. We would have
been a juicy target. The guard went inside to fetch an officer,
who came out and listened with us. He finally decided the
noises were made by birds. But he admitted it was an awfully
early hour for birds to be awake, and he stayed outside,
too, sending a soldier back into his tent to bring hi his
helmet.

Dawn finally came, without incident Patrols which had
been sent out to search the area returned with word that the
Chinese had melted back behind their lines. But the corps
officers, who bore a heavy responsibility for co-ordinating
the battle, decided they could think better about the big pic-
ture if they did not have to worry all night about themselves.
It was a sensible decision, and immediately after breakfast
the tents were struck and the headquarters, with its three
generals and numerous colonels, fell back some twenty miles
to Yong Dung Po, which is just across the river from Seoul.
The only thing they left behind, except for some closed
latrines and garbage pits, was a clump of spring flowers

26

which had been planted, in a moment of optimism, outside
one of the staff general's vans.

Hoping to catch a plane to another sector of the front, I
went back to the Seoul airport. When General Van Fleet
arrived at the same field a few minutes later for his first look
around, it was a hectic moment to take command of an
army. He did not know all that had transpired during the
night But he did know the situation at the front was critical.
And he was just about to transfer to a small plane for a hop to
Uijongbu and a conference with his corps commander when
someone informed him his corps was no longer there. I have
known a number of generals, some of whom were quite mild,
but I do not believe any of them would have taken this minor
but disturbing bit of chaos quite as General Van Fleet did.
He did not turn on his aide, as some generals might have
done, and bawl him out for not knowing this. He merely
looked a little helpless. It was I, I remember, who mentioned
that corps had moved to Yong Dung Po. Then, not knowing
just what one does do for a lost general, and not knowing
General Van Fleet as yet, I shut up. He spotted a Negro
sergeant sitting in the only available jeep, ambled over to
where the sergeant sat, asked him politely if he knew where
Yong Dung Po was, and when the sergeant replied, "Yes, sir,"
asked him if he could bum a ride. Then he rode across the
river to work, and those of us on the airfield knew that the
Korean war was in steady, unratded hands.

Within a few days the Chinese were out of breath and Van
Fleet set out to tackle what was to be his greatest contribu-
tion to the war: the reorganization and retraining of the
South Korean army. General Ridgway had begun the pro-
gram in 1951. Van Fleet carried it to its conclusion. He was
just the man for this job. We knew the general had made out
extremely well with native troops in Greece, and we soon

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 27

learned in Korea that his earlier success had been no ac-
cident.

Throughout the war the Koreans had often been more of
a liability than an asset. This was not their fault, however.
Under Japanese rule, which lasted forty years, the Koreans
had not been allowed to progress or to learn any skills for
fear they might become too good and rise against their mas-
ters. The Japanese had provided the technicians, leaving only
the dirty work for the Koreans. When we went to Korea, for
example, we had to search out Japanese port supervisors who
had worked there and take them back with us. For the
Koreans had never been allowed to learn how to operate the
unloading machinery on their own docks. And when we tried
to help the Koreans get their fishing fleets operating again,
we had to go to Japan for the charts that told where the fish
were. To keep the Koreans from becoming self-sufficient, the
Japanese had always taken them out themselves and told
them when to start fishing; the Koreans had never even been
able to learn where they were. A few Koreans had served in
the Japanese army, but always either as enlisted men or as
junior officers. Consequently the average Korean soldier,
though a game and amazingly sturdy little fellow, had little
mechanical know-how and almost no experience in the art of
leadership, without which any unit under pressure will fall
apart.

There were individual exceptions. Early in the war we had
taken a good number of Koreans into American units as extra
riflemen and scouts, and they were invaluable. They learned
quickly, and with proper leadership they became such good
fighters that I often heard American sergeants and lieu-
tenants say they would rather have ROKs for certain mis-
sions than GIs. But these men were considered good because
they were serving directly under and with Americans.

28

To stem the tide against the Chinese and to help man the
150-mile-long front, we had had to rush all-ROK units into
combat, in many cases without even giving them basic train-
ing. And because they were not adequately trained we could
not afford to entrust to them the more expensive weapons of
war like tanks, planes, and artillery pieces. It was a vicious
circle, and as a result the poor ROKs were ill prepared for
the crushing attacks the Chinese threw at them. They hated
and feared the Chinese because of earlier historical experi-
ence with brutal Chinese overlords and the Chinese, know-
ing their weakness, usually picked on them more than they
did on us.

To make up for the ROK deficiency in equipment, we sent
U.S. tank and artillery units over to give them a hand. Even
with this extra support the ROKs often buckled under the
pressure of modern, unfamiliar war. And when this happened
they usually ran so fast and so silently to the rear that the
GIs in their midst did not even know they had left until it
was too late and the Chinese were on top of them. We lost
a good number of Americans because of this, and for a long
time the average American soldier had no use, understand-
ably enough, for the average ROK. The Koreans are sensitive
people, and when the word got around among the Americans
that they could not fight they developed a serious inferiority
complex and decided we were right.

This was where General Van Fleet came in. Flying up and
down the front in a cub plane, he visited all the ROK units,
spotted the smartest officers, put them in command of train-
ing schools to turn out other smart officers, pulled ROK units
from the line, one at a time, for extensive maneuvers and
retraining in some cases for their first basic training and
saw to it that they got their full complement of weapons,
including artillery.

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 29

Through it all he treated his eager charges as if he were
their firm but friendly uncle. He let them know he trusted
and respected them. He told them he knew they could fight,
and that when he sent them back to the front he expected
them not to let him down. They did not. The same troops
who had once crumbled and run in front of the feared Chi-
nese went back up front and at places like Whitehorse Moun-
tain took on wave after wave of Chinese assaults and
withstood some of the heaviest artillery barrages ever fired
at anyone, in any war, anywhere. There is no doubt that they
did all this for General Van fleet as much as for their own
honor. He liked them, and they knew it And they recip-
rocated.

Van Fleet was the right man in the right place at the right
time. Through the long periods of stalemate which coincided
with his command, it was his personality solid and plodding
where Ridgway had, with similar necessity, been flashy and
dramatic which best fitted the ticklish job of keep the Eighth
Army on its toes, but at the same time in right rein. For Van
Fleet's orders were to defend the line and hold the fort, but
not to move forward on any casualty-consuming adventures.
He was to inflict as much punishment on the Reds as he
could with TmrifrmTm losses to his own side. It was a difficult
assignment for a two-fisted general like Van Fleet. He
understandably chafed at the constraints placed on him. And
his own personal frustration at not being allowed to fight
it out to a finish, with his friends the ROKs at his side, boiled
over when he finally returned home and had his say.

As the Koreans responded to Van Fleet's magnetic warmth,
he responded to theirs. And as they fought their hearts out
for him, their goals and their desires including fighting on to
the Yalu and the unification of Korea became his, and Van
Fleet became the Koreans* most devoted champion. Consid-

30

ering how he felt about the war in Korea, Van Fleet's
achievement that of fighting a classic example of static,
limited warfare is all the more remarkable. For he worked
under some serious handicaps.

One of his problems was that he could go just so far with
his masterpiece, the ROK army. Its generals were all young
men (mostly in their early thirties) whose only previous
experience had been as junior officers in the Japanese army.
Even under Van Fleet's expert tutelage they could hardly
have been expected to acquire, overnight, the kind of solid
judgment and experienced intuition which is necessary to
plan and run off large-scale battles. They were at their best
when they had a U.S. division in the line next to them, as an
anchor and an inspiration. And they were too young and
inexperienced (compared to our generals, who are in their
fifties before they take on such tremendous responsibilities)
to turn completely loose. They especially lacked experience
in the kind of high-level staff work that is necessary to dove-
tail and manipulate all the hundreds of units and hinges and
overlapping flanks which make up a front as long and com-
plex as that which jutted across Korea. They would be able,
because of their retraining, to stand alone against an all-
North Korean army, but against the wily Chinese soldier,
with all his professional tricks, they were still likely to make
some amateurish and fatal mistakes. They could not and still
cannot go it alone. They still need us, right in the line beside
them.

Though the concept of Oriental "inscrutability" is usually
overstressed by Westerners, the Korean officers for all their
West Point-type training retained a number of strictly Ori-
ental characteristics which made it difficult for them to run
a modern army with our standards. A ROK colonel, for
example a regimental commander to whom we had given

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 31

extensive training and attentionhad his position attacked
one night by the Chinese and was forced by strong enemy
pressure to pull his troops back off a crucial hill. He decided,
in a moment of Oriental embarrassment, not to report his
predicament to higher headquarters. It was simply a matter
of face. Instead he kept his own counsel and before dawn
the following morning he was all set to order his regiment
into a frontal assault on the hill. He was hoping to take
it back before anyone missed it. But in order to keep his
problem a secret he had to make a further decision: he
would launch the attack without air or artillery support
which he would have had to request through channels, thus
giving it away that he was in trouble.

Fortunately an American advisory officer learned of his
plan in the nick of time and put a stop to it Without air and
artillery to support his attack he would almost certainly have
annihilated his own regiment in a suicidal mission. The
enemy could then have poured through the gap in the line
caused by the ROK colonel's failure, and that, in turn, might
have meant the eventual loss of the entire divisional sector.
But even more important, the colonel had withheld impor-
tant information from his higher commanders. They would
not have blamed him for the loss of the hill; but it was im-
portant that they knew about it, and in time to take emer-
gency action. The failure of one colonel to report the exact
situation on his front, whether it was caused by a matter of
face or a broken telephone line, could be disastrous.

We did our best to teach the ROKs these basic principles.
But it was impossible, in so short a time, for us to change
their entire psychology to the point where they thought like
us and we could trust them implicitly. In a way the ROK
army was like a Frankenstein monster. We created it and it
fought magnificently, but we could not always control it.

32

But General Van Fleet's greatest problem was not the
ROKs. It was the nearly insurmountable job of maintaining
morale and fighting spirit in a static army. The GIs were
credited with so many points per month depending on how
close they happened to be to the front. As soon as they had
totaled enough points they could leave Korea. This was a fair
and necessary personnel policy, and one of its benefits was
that it produced a turnover in men which not only spread the
duty equitably around but at the same time gave the army
a larger cadre of experienced fighters.

However, the policy also had its drawback: it seriously
hampered fighting initiative. It is the most understandable
reaction in the world that many men took the line of least
resistance, kept their heads down, took as few chances as
they could get away with, and lived for each month and its
points to pass safely by. To keep an army on its toes in such a
situation was a difficult task. And that is one of the reasons
I believe the war in Korea was well fought. It was nothing
short of magnificent to see the number of American kids who
did not keep their heads down, who did take chances, and
who were willing, when the chips were down, to stand up
and fight, whether the war seemed to make much sense to
them or not.

We could not have stayed in Korea if we had not had a lot
of men like that. And it is of those men, and of their feats,
that I am thinking when I say we were not defeated in Korea.

in

WHY, IF WE HAD so many good men in Korea and such
good generals to command them, did we not fight the war
there to a finish? Why, if it was a good war and needed to be
fought, did we not go on up to the Yalu again, destroy the
enemy, and give ourselves a real victory? Why did we have to
take a substitute?

These are the $64 questions about Korea. It is the answers
to them which have become lost in the general confusion.
They are not so complicated as they seem. The difficulty lies
chiefly in finding the original thread and following it to the
end.

34

The war in Korea was never intended as a conclusive war.
Unlike World Wars I and II, which were supposed to end
something, once and for all, the Korean war was fought from
the start as an emergency measure. No one thought or
should have that by landing on that tiny appendix to Asia
we would be defeating world communism. We went to Korea
for two simple reasons: (1) a stand had to be made some-
place; the enemy had to be warned; (2) we could not afford
to let Korea go.

It was a ghastly place to make a stand. -It was, as I have
said, poor terrain, unsuited to the efficient tank-infantry
combinations we had used so effectively in Europe. And it
bore no resemblance, despite an Oriental cast of characters,
to our war against Japan. We had chased the Japanese from
island to island, with the full realization that as we kicked
them off one island they could not come back there again.
We had no such assurance in Korea, where we dangled pre-
cariously from a narrow peninsula and were in the position
of butting our heads against all the dead weight of a vast
continent looming above us. Our forces had to be supplied
by sea painstakingly, boat by boat and gun by gun while
the enemy had only to pour his men and materials overland
from the secure interior of Russia and China. We were in the
enemy's own back yard, within easy reach of his millions of
reserves, and It was a brave act on our part ever to invade it
at all.

The war in Korea was started at a time in our history when
we were reduced to answering the enemy's challenges. Wher-
ever he started a fire, we sent a fire engine. We called this a
policy of containment, and though it served its purpose it
became apparent after a while that there might be some
question as to who was containing whom. There were piles of
tinder everywhere in the world, and if the enemy chose to

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 35

stick matches to all of them simultaneously, we would soon
be out o fire engines. At least we would have deployed them
where the enemy had wanted them sent when he started the
fires. And then, if that had been his only goal, he would have
won the game.

But we had to send the fire engines to Korea. We had to
contain the Red Army there. One look at a map will show
why. If the enemy had seized all of Korea he would have
had a perfect outflanking position from which to nibble away
at Japan. Pusan is only 125 miles from the vital Yawata steel
mills on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu. Japan, her-
self, is as vital to our over-all defense, as a Pacific base, as
England is on the other side of the world. Both islands are
unsinkable aircraft carriers anchored permanently off the
shores of either unfriendly or potentially unfriendly conti-
nents. But though England is a friendly and secure ally of
long standing, Japan, of course, is not. And unlike England,
she was and still is in no shape to defend herself. (See
Chapters XI and XII for a further discussion of Japan.) We
had to counter the threat ourselves, even if it came from
that most unprepossessing of enemy outposts, North Korea.

And so we went to war. Our task was to push back the
flood of Communist power which threatened Korea and
Japan, and to build a dam across Korea against it, a dam of
determined men standing on sandbagged bunkers, with guns
and tanks to back them up.

But it was not our show alone.

Though the U.S. challenged the enemy's move and was the
first to send in troops, we also called for help, as we entered
battle, from the United Nations, which we had helped found
and nurture for this very kind of emergency. Troops from
fifteen different countries responded including, eventually,
a full division from the British Commonwealth (which was

36

also sitting on other hot spots throughout the world), a regi-
ment of Turks (who had good reason, because of their
dangerous proximity to Russia, to stay home under the covers
if they wanted to), a battalion from France (which had a
dam of her own to build in Indo-China), and companies and
platoons from such varied and brave little countries as Thai-
land, Belgium, the Philippines, Colombia, Luxembourg, the
Netherlands, South Africa, Ethiopia (which remembered
that a prior united action might have saved her life), and
Greece (which remembered Van Fleet).

It was a motley crowd, and many a front-line switchboard
operator went slowly crazy trying to unscramble the nightly
babel of tongues that poured through his earphones Turks
trying to reach their mission headquarters in Tokyo, Greeks
trying to get word to the Greek transport pilot in Pusan to
bring up some more olive oil on his next courier run, the
French complaining about the lag in their wine ration, a
Cockney sergeant trying to raise NAAFI (the British PX in
Seoul) to request another batch of tea and marmalade for
his colonel's mess. The Puerto Ricans had a regiment in
Korea, and sometimes one of their men would get on the line
and momentarily forget his broken English. And every once
in a while an operator, if he was lucky, would hear the soft,
lovely voice of a Norwegian or Swedish nurse trying to get
through from a forward hospital to a compatriot on a hos-
pital ship anchored off Pusan.

It was a pleasant and stimulating juxtaposition of brave and
dedicated people. And one of the miracles of the Korean war
was that so many diverse people, with so many different food
requirements, fighting methods, and tongues, could have
been welded together into a cohesive army. Exciting as it
was, the adventure often had its tragic moments. The U.S.
provided liaison officers and communications personnel, who

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 37

were scattered through all these front-line units to handle
the complicated equipment and radio jargon necessary to
bring in a flight of supporting American jet planes whose
pilots, of course, did not speak Greek or Ethiopian or a
barrage of supporting U.S. artillery. Now and then, in the
rush of war and the clash of accents, there would be a mis-
understanding: a plane would come in and accidentally drop
its bombs short of its target sometimes, unfortunately, on
top of the Greeks or the Turks. Or occasionally the American
specialists who were sharing the battle with the non-Ameri-
can troops would become casualties themselves. Then, until
replacements could be sent up to handle the microphones,
the non-Americans would have to go without American air
or artillery support.

Perhaps the worst disaster of all along this line occurred
to the British, whose only language problem in a war man-
aged by the U.S. for the U.N. was that they did not speak
American. Commands and bits of intelligence passed along
in the heat of battle are often so subtle that even a mispro-
nounced word can spell tragedy.

Once, when the Gloucestershire Regiment happened to be
under the control of an American division, it was hit by a
furious enemy attack. The American general, so the front-
line legend goes, got a call through to the British colonel
commanding the Gloucesters and asked him, **How are you
making outr^* The situation was critical, even untenable. But
the colonel was too much of a soldier, and a gentlemanly
British soldier at that, to put it just that way. Instead, with
a stiff upper lip and typical understatement, he muttered
back over the phone, "It is a bit sticky/* A British general
would have understood his meaning and might have pulled
hf back in time to save the unit. Instead the American com-
mander, who could not be expected to understand, muttered

38

something like "Well, carry on," and hung up the phone. The
Gloucesters stuck by their position, willing to fight, as they
thought the Americans wanted them to, to the very last.
Finally, with the Chinese overrunning them and the situa-
tion hopelessly out of hand, the Gloucester colonel gave per-
mission for his men to leave and make it back to friendly
territory if they could. The Chinese followed them as they
went, picking off one man at a time. As if this were not bad
enough, American tankers on the front line thought the
British crawling toward them were Chinese and shot up
several more. Only a handful survived. The colonel kept his
lip stiff to the last and remained behind to beg the enemy
to care for his wounded. He was taken prisoner.

And so we did not go it alone. As we pushed the enemy
back toward the 38th Parallel and over it again, our fortunes
were bound up, almost inextricably, with the fortunes and
men of fifteen other nations, without whose help we could
not have accomplished the task. The Greeks took this hill,
the fanatic Ethiopians took that one; the Turks held one di-
visional flank, the Puerto Ricans another; the British helped
seal off the enemy's route to Seoul; and the RQKs who were
to have some 45,000 of their men killed in action-manned
more than half the line as the war ended.

It was not entirely our war, then, to win or to lose.

There was no way to fight it out in Korea without sustain-
ing heavy casualties. But some of the small countries, which
had already spent heavily of their treasure, could not afford
to spend more. And neither, if I have read the results and
some of the speeches of the 1952 presidential campaign cor-
rectly, could we. If we could not get our boys home, we at
least did not relish throwing them into any more bloody
battles.

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 39

But it was not merely manpower that curtailed us from
seeking an all-out victory. If it had been only a matter of
cannon fodder, we could probably have found enough, some-
where. Again, the explanation for our predicament does not
lie on the surface, in the hands of some diplomat or general
whom we can pin down through investigation and publicly
horsewhip for his error. It lies, once again, in the elusive
nature of the war itself.

It is just possible, for example, that we had the enemy
licked at one time and did not know it.

When the truce talks began in July 1951 the enemy was
hurt. In May of that year we had counterattacked the Chi-
nese and had crippled him badly in several sectors. In some
areas we had overrun his stocks of ammunition, which, be-
cause these are normally placed to the immediate rear, near
the guns, indicated that we must have pierced through the
crust of his defenses. In some sectors, then, we had the
enemy on the ropes. And it is possible that had we been
able to sustain our attack and keep punching we might have
kayoed him. That is, we might have destroyed the bulk of
the armies he then had in Korea.

But we lacked two items we needed to finish the job then
and there: ( 1 ) We needed reserves. Our men were tired just
putting the enemy on the ropes. The situation had developed
so suddenly that we had no time to prepare for it We needed
a new team, and quickly. That called for major decisions in
Seoul, Tokyo, Washington, London, Paris, and a lot of other
places, all at once. It meant getting dozens of wheels mov-
ing, hundreds of ships and planes, thousands of men and
millions of bullets aH in a rush, if we were to capitalize on
our big chance. But (2) we kcked the necessary solid in-
formation on which to base such momentous decisions. We

40

lacked confirmed intelligence reports. We knew the enemy
was hurt, but we were not sure just how badly. We were not
sure of his residual strength. We knew we had captured
much of his front-line ammunition, but we did not know
what proportion of his total ready stock this amounted to.
And though we had a hunch the enemy was reeling, we did
not find out how badly until later, from hindsight, though
the enemy himself was only a mile or less away.

This problem, the nightmare of intelligence, haunted us
throughout the Korean war and is another phase of that war
which must be understood before it is possible to realize
what really happened in Korea, and why.

No general, even if he has a million spare men, a thousand
extra field pieces, and a blank check from home, can con-
scientiously or safely move so much as a regiment against
the enemy until he is certain what he will run into. He is
like a businessman who cannot gamble his resources until he
knows what the market is. The general must at least know
the odds. His intelligence knowledge of the enemy's strength
and disposition, his morale and will to fight, and his prob-
able line of action is invaluable. But it is also extremely dif-
ficult to procure (anything so valuable always is). The job
of collecting intelligence in Europe, where we had innumer-
able informers eager to help us and with whom we could
plant our own people without too great risk of detection
(because of racial and language similarities) was difficult
enough. In Korea, an alien land in which we had no ties of
culture or blood or language, the work was often nearly
impossible.

A good illustration of how important and difficult it was
to keep tabs on the enemy came on the first day of the truce,
when both sides began, for the first time, to rise up from the
protection of their holes and look across at the other side

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 41

without the danger of being blown to bits by a sudden bar-
rage of mortars. It was a fantastic experience, especially for
the Marines. For months they had been face to face with the
Chinese. They had watched the enemy lines like hawks look-
ing for a mouse, and they had listened to every sound com-
ing from the enemy with the earnest concentration of a con-
vocation of bird watchers trying to identify a new wren.
They finally decided that the Chinese dug in opposite them
consisted, at most, of a company. This was an important de-
cision, for if the Marines had been ordered to attack the
Chinese their success and their lives would have depended
upon their taking along enough men to handle the job.
Imagine their shock on truce morning when the Chinese
crawled out of their hillside bunkers and turned out to be
not a company of about two hundred men but a regiment of
more than a thousand!

If you are a commander, squared off across sandbags, guns,
barbed wire, and mine fields, against an enemy who is play-
ing for keeps, there is little you can do, in the way of a
direct approach, to find out what he is up to. But that must
not deter you. You cannot just sit and wait and see what he
does. You have to know before he attacks whether he is
likely to attack, and about how hard. If you don't, you stand
to lose your men, your hill, your job, and your war. There are
ways.

Sometimes you can pull off a small attack, small enough so
that you don't risk too many of your own men, but large
enough to ensure piercing the enemy's lines and getting back
with a live prisoner or two. The more the better, but they
must, of course, be alive. Then you put your interrogators to
work on the prisoners and hope they come up with some-
thing. Sometimes if you can learn only the prisoner's home
town youVe got something. It may give you your first clue,

42

for example, that Cantonese troops have been moved into
the war. This may not mean so much to you, on the front
lines, but it will be helpful to men in higher headquarters
who are keeping track of the enemy's armies. In order to
clarify your own situation, there on the front line, you need
more detailed information than that, of course. You need to
know exactly where, on that range of hills facing you, he is
dug in at his strongest; you'd like to know where his artillery
pieces are so you can have them knocked out and you have
to know as much about the enemy's troop movements as you
can determine. Prisoners are good sources of this kind of in-
formationprovided you can get enough of them, for pur-
poses of cross-checking, and provided they know anything.
In Korea, unfortunately, we usually had to interview a large
number of men we rarely got an infantry officer before we
could string together enough miscellaneous sentences to make
even a paragraph for G-2. The men were not loquacious, and
they were not too well informed.

Instead of attacking for your information, you could also
send out patrols, to probe and feel the enemy's muscle. This
was done daily. The patrol's job was to wend its way through
the barbed wire and mines and the enemy's field of fire and
creep as close to the enemy positions as possible. There the
men were to keep their eyes open without being seen and
their ears alert without being heard and return again with
whatever scrap of information or hunch about the enemy's
strength and disposition they could gather. Sometimes they
were able to bring back a prisoner. More often they returned
minus one or two of their own men.

During the early days of the war, before we went to the
Yalu, patrols were able to go out in daylight, when it was
possible actually to see something and when, on their return,
their officers could ask, reasonably enough, "Well, what did

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 43

you see?" About halfway through the war, however, the
enemy's artillery and mortar fire became so heavy and ac-
curate that we had to stop sending out daylight patrols. They
were sitting ducks, and it was a waste of cannon fodder to
shove them into the open. We shifted, instead, to night pa-
trolling, so the enemy could not see and fire on our men so
easily. Of course the patrols could not see the enemy either.
And we had to be content from then on with a good deal less
information from that source.

Night patrols usually went out immediately after dusk and
followed a prearranged route so the men who stayed behind
could follow their progress and keep them covered in the
event the patrol came under attack. Sometimes the patrol
would find a place to hide and lie in ambush for an hour or
sojust in case the enemy happened by on a patrol of his
own. At other times, when we had been out of contact with
the enemy for some time and our commanders were begging
for some idea of where the enemy was^ we would order a
patrol to go out as deeply as it could, make a little noise so
as to draw fire thus determining the enemy's approximate
strength and his nervous reaction as well as his location
and hightail it for home. More often than not the men on
these patrols did not see or hear a thing. Either the enemy
had pulled back to regroup, or he purposely held his fire
in order to make us think he didn't live there any more. On
these occasions, when the pickings were slim and the sight-
ings rare, the intelligence officer could only ask a patrol on
its return, "Well, did you smell anything?" This was not as
siDy a question as it may sound. The Chinese liked a good deal
of garlic in their food. And the odor from it usually lingered
over an area for several hours after they had eaten. An ex-
perienced patrol could sometimes hazard a good guess as
to the enemy's approximate strength, the hour he'd been

44

around, and perhaps even the direction he had taken, all
from studying the subtle whiff of garlic in the still, night air.
It was a fascinating game, but an extremely inconclusive way
to fight a modern war.

We had other ways of studying the enemy. We made
reconnaissance flights over enemy territory and brought back
aerial photographs. Our intelligence experts would pore over
these through high-powered magnifying glasses, and an ex-
perienced photo-interpreter could tell a fresh hole in the
ground, or a fresh bit of camouflage, from an old one, just
by looking at a picture of it, taken from thousands of feet
in the air. Sometimes, if he spotted enough holes, he knew
he had an enemy build-up area. We usually let these areas
ripen until we were sure they were chock-full of men. We
could seldom see the men in the pictures, for in daylight,
when our recon planes went over, the men usually hid out.
But at night, when we were fairly certain they'd be outside
getting some fresh air or listening to the exhortations of their
commissars, we'd fly a B-29 or two in very high, and ever so
quietly, and let them have it. This was good use of intel-
ligence, but it was a drop in the bucket compared to the
millions of men and shovels which the enemy had at his
disposal.

One of our best sources of information in this, as in all
wars, was from agents. We were lucky in this field to have had
another right man in the right place. He is a man whose name
was never reported in the press, and probably won t be. I
happened to stumble across his existence, and though I spent
months haunting his hideaway, trying to get him to spring
at least a part of his story, he was too conscientious a spy
ever to give in. Without divulging his name in order to keep

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 45

a promise not to publicize Tifm so long as he was on the job
I'm going to tell as much about 'him as I can, to show how
few our friends were in Korea and how difficult they were
to come by.

Fortunately someone had thought about Korea long be-
fore it happened six years bef ore, to be exact and had sent
this American, whom I shall call Bill, to set up an intelligence
apparatus there* Bill is a big, beefy, fast-tatting man who
looks and acts more like a motor sergeant or a chief cook
than he does an agent in fact he once was a motor sergeant
He learned to speak Korean fluently, a most difficult feat,
and he had a good head start on the war. Before it began he
had roamed the length and breadth of Korea under various
guises and when it broke out he had a small but devoted
band of friends on both sides of the Parallel whom he knew
he could count on. He had compiled dossiers on North
Korean leaders, and he knew more about THm H Sung and
his generals than perhaps even their wives and mistresses
knew. He had also kept tabs on enemy airfields, barracks
construction, and troop locations. He was our only solid link
with North Korea, and it was his advice and inside informa-
tion that were responsible, more than anything else, for our
ability to stay there, against the tremendous odds and under
the immense confusion which marked the early days.

When I discovered him, Bill was well hidden away in a
compound in Seoul. You had to pass several furtive-looking,
on-their-toes Korean guards to get in, then climb a steep
flight of stairs, wind around through a maze of hallways in
what appeared to be an old schoolhouse, climb another flight
of stairs, and finally reach his door, which was always closed.
You always knocked before entering, for you never knew
whom he had closeted with him.

He wore an old pair of fatigues, which had been washed

46

too often to fit him, and he sat, awkwardly, in a huge, red,
revolving, overstuffed chair that had once belonged to Kim
II Sung. On the floor were big trunks full of snapshots pic-
tures made by his agents of North Korean planes and pilots,
of Communist executions and firing squads, of Pyongyang
politicians, and of his own eager young helpers. He had a
terrain map of Korea which was so big it had to run side-
ways along one entire wall. A stuffed bird of some kind,
presumably left over from the building's school days, stood
on a filing cabinet, like a mute guard over the room when
Bill was out. At his elbow was a short-wave radio with which
he kept in touch with his detachments on the secret islands
off both coasts, from which the U.N. carried on radar, rescue,
and intelligence operations. He also had telephones on his
desk, but he seldom used them. Usually he just opened a
window and bellowed for someone in the compound when
he wanted anything.

It wasn't Hitchcock, but it worked beautifully.

Most of Bill's unit consisted of bright young Koreans who
had heard about his work and come around to volunteer
their services. There was no pay in it for them. And no glory.
They had to keep their work secret for fear some "friend" or
even relative might turn out to be with the enemy and tip off
someone in North Korea to watch for them.

These men were Bill's agents, and their job was to get into
North Korea, learn all they could about the enemy, and then
get word of what they knew back to Bill in time for it to do
the U.N. some good. There were all kinds of ways of getting
them in. Some just drifted across the front when no one was
looking. Others were dropped in by parachute in the dead of
night. Still others were landed by boat on enemy shores, then
picked up later at some rendezvous point.

Bill could not get the kind of boat he needed for this

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 47

risky operation it had to be fast, quiet, strong enough to
withstand shore fire, and well armed so he built his own,
in a boatyard he set up in the back yard of his compound,
right in the center of Seoul and fifteen miles from the nearest
harbor. Whenever he could get away from his secret reports
and his radio, he'd sneak down to the yard and spend his
time sawing on a piece of timber or watching the Korean
shipbuilders (who were also volunteers) as they hammered
away at the deck planking. He watched every piece of wood
go into his boat, and for a good reason: about twice a month
Bill went along on a mission himself, just to keep his oar in,
and he wanted to make sure the boat would get him there,
and back.

There was no military precedent for this kind of outfit,
and so BiH had to scrounge for much of his gear: boat en-
gines from the Navy at Inchon, plywood from an Army
headquarters, radio parts from the Signal Corps, and even
food and medicine for his Koreans from friendly quarter-
master and medical depots. He had a staff of American officers
and enlisted men working under him, but he supervised
every detail himself. Once, within the space of fifteen min-
utes, I saw Tmn talk over the radio with an agent in North
Korea, discuss the merits of an engine he needed with a
naval officer who had dropped by, assign a lieutenant to go
out with a truck and steal some extra cots someplace for
his men, pick up a hammer and show his Korean carpenters
how to anchor a joist in an improvised recreation room he
was building for his unit, go back to the radio to give in-
structions for the evacuation of a wounded agent from a
secret island base, then jump in his jeep and head for the
airport, from where he hastily flew up to the base himself
to make sure the man was properly cared for.

He was the hardest-working man I ever saw in Korea. He

48

kept moving a good eighteen hours a day, seven days a week.
He interviewed agents before they went out, interrogated
them when they returned, and read every scrap of informa-
tion that came in about North Korea. He ate lunch at his
desk brought to him by his Korean number one boy, who'd
been with him for six years and could tell, just by looking at
Bill, what he was thinkingin English or Korean. Bill never
took a drink and he didn't smoke. And he was never seen
with a Korean girl. A sergeant who worked for Bill and who
confessed to me one day that this was the weirdest outfit he'd
ever been associated with during fifteen years in the Army
told me Bill had no personal life at all. His only relaxation
was tinkering with his boats. As for girls, Bill had an idea his
Korean followers would lose their respect for him the minute
he stopped working and showed he was human. So long as
he kept them guessing, he was boss. He set a fast and re-
lentless pace, and with the odds against him as they were
against anyone in his kind of work he knew he could never
relax it. When he went to sleep at night, it was in the same
compound he worked in, with two telephones by his bed-
one of them hooked up to his short-wave radio.

But even Bill, with his dedicated, inexhaustible energy,
was fighting an uphill battle. The Koreans are a tough, and
by nature a cruel, people. Like other Orientals, their society
is shot through with intrigue and with complex, built-in
channels of intelligence and counterintelligence. They have
had so much experience with police repression even under
Rhee that they seem to have developed an instinct for
knowing when they are among friends and when someone in
the group is a stool pigeon. No one trusts anyone. And de-
spite the fact that every other Korean boy seems to be named
Kim and the ones in between Paik the Koreans themselves
have no trouble keeping their people apart and watching

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 49

them all. It may take a long time, if the man is clever, but
an agent is usually found out. And when he is, the reaction,
in cruel Korea, is always swift and usually fatal. On Bill's
wall were framed portraits of some of his own young agents
who had not come back.

We had a good deal of trouble along this line from people
on our own side. Once the South Korean police captured a
North Korean air force officer who had escaped and made his
way to Seoul Presumably he knew a good deal about the
enemy's air potential The U. S. Air Force, hungry for any-
thing it could learn on this subject, heard about the cap-
tured officer and sent an intelligence man hurrying to the
Seoul police station to have a good long and informative talk
with the prisoner. We knew that as an escapee he was prob-
ably a turncoat and would be likely to tell all he knew. But
our man got to the station too kte. The South Koreans, in
a typical moment of angry retribution, had summarily shot
the officer as a spy. It had never occurred to them that he
might be more valuable alive. They had made no attempt to
question him.

The enemy behaved the same way, only worse. Rarely did
one of our agents, who was unlucky enough to get captured,
face any alternative but immediate execution. The occasional
exception came when he fell into the hands of an enemy
unit which was smart enough usually the more practical
Chinese to think of a better solution: put the man to work
for them. When this happened the man would be milked of
all he knew, given a brief brainwashing, and sent back to us.
He would tell us just enough not to arouse our suspicions,
and then, after a brief rest, we would send him back again to
spy on the enemy. There he would tell the enemy officers just
enough about us not to arouse their suspicions and come
bouncing back again. It was a precarious life at best And it

50

watered down by a good fifty per cent the man's value to us.
Even so, what few little tidbits he continued to provide were
better than no intelligence at all.

For a good deal of our lower-level intelligence, upon which
we had to base our day-to-day conduct of the war, we were
forced to rely on an even further refinement of this system.
We used men, and occasionally women and even children,
who went back and forth across the lines, pretending to be
simple peasant folk who were naively innocent of the fact
that they were cutting right across the margins of a war, and
yet who were known to everyone for what they really were:
double agents spies for both sides. Because each side nat-
urally prided itself on being able to get more out of these
agents than the other side did, the practice developed into a
steady, if erratic, source of information.

We had to learn something, often anything, about the
enemy to our front. Our patrols had penetrated as far as they
could go. We could spot nothing significant on the aerials.
We had to have some splinter of intelligence on which to base
our plans. The naive old Korean farmer might, in his nervous
excitement, give us just the due we needed. Usually it was
nothing very solid. Perhaps only that "two days' walk be-
fore*' he had seen some strangers no, he would say, they
were not Koreans, they were Chinese and they were digging
a hole for some kind of gun. No, they had no truck; they had
to pull the gun by hand. Where was the gun? Behind the
village of Kodum-ri, next to the road, maybe one hundred
paces from the last house. ( Our officers pinpointed this on a
map, for future artillery target designations.) How big was
the gun? Oh, he hadn't looked too closely. It was too dan-
gerous, you know, to act too curious around the enemy. But
perhaps the hole in the end of the gun was just about as big
as that can of food there on the stove.

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 51

This was nothing startling or tremendously valuable. We
probably would have discovered the gun by taldng sound
bearings on it later, when it began to fire on us. But, as any
reader of detective stories knows, a good investigator can
fit enough small clues together and finally, if he's lucky, solve
the crime. So can a good G-2 officer.

The enemy, of course, played the same game. He also
needed information. He was ahead of us already, for he was
indigenous and he knew better how to handle the people.
Even so, he usually had big gaps on his intelligence charts.
And so, when the old man left our command post with his
can of food roughly the size of a gun tube he was sent along
through channels and allowed to cross the lines, so he could
come back again one day. The Chinese would meet "him when
he got across, usher him to their command post, and ask him
what he had seten. Oh, he might say, nothing important this
trip. But they would not accept this, and after making this
clear they would ask Tn'm again.

Well, he might say, he had seen some big tanks across the .
valley. Yes, the enemy interrogators would say, they knew
about those the tanks had been shooting at them. What else
had he seen? Well, he had seen an officer with silver insignia
in the American tent. Naturally, said the enemy they as-
sumed the Americans had officers. What else? Their tone of
voice might have sounded threatening by now. And because
the farmer lived with his family on their side of the line and
depended for his family's life on pleasing both sides just a
little, he had to think of something that would satisfy them.

Describe the patch on the officer's shoulder, the enemy
might prompt him, just in case the unit had been shifted and
a fresh outfit brought in. The old farmer had not noticed, and
he grew a little panicky as he stroked his black, thin beard.

Oh yes, he said finally, his old head shaking as if to tell

52

them how stupid he really was. When he returned through
the lines, he explained, lie had had to be very careful. For
two days before, when he went across, he had noticed that
the Americans were out digging small holes and planting
things in the ground. He had had to walk a long way around
his usual route. Where was this? the enemy shouted at him,
bringing out their maps and making him bend over them.
Carefully, they showed him on the map where he was just
then, where he had been on the American side they often
knew the command post locations and where he had come
across the previous evening. Where were the holes in rela-
tion to all this? The old man, who could not read a map, did
not understand. They showed him again, describing how
everything looked on the ground in relation to the map. Had
he come over this field before he reached their lines? Or
down this draw? Was there a stream where he left the road?
Was there a farmhouse where the holes were?

Finally, when he understood, the old man nodded swiftly,
relieved that at last he had pleased them. A Chinese officer
took out his pencil and marked his symbol for our mines over
the spot the old man settled on.

We would have a fact, and the enemy would have a fact.
That the enemy sometimes got a bigger and better fact than
we did was due not so much to inferior intelligence for after
the Yalu debacle we had learned our lesson as it was to the
original and nearly insurmountable proposition concerning
Korea: that we were fighting an uphill battle in an alien land.

IV

THERE WERE no short cuts to a victory in Korea.

It was the first war we had fought since the advent of the
Atomic Era, and it was natural that something remarkable
should have been expected from it in the way of an easy
victory. We now have planes capable of flying halfway
around the world, releasing atomic bombs, refueling in the
air, and flying home again. -We have perfected and tested
artillery pieces that can fire atomic shells. We know that
these are devastating weapons, capable of inflicting tremen-
dous damage on the enemy.

54

Why, then, could we not, especially in a tiny country like
Korea, just sit back and blow the place up by pushing some
buttons? Why didn't we drop some atomic bombs and get
it over with? Why didn't we turn our Air Force loose, espe-
cially across the Yalu, and really get down to business? Why
didn't we use atomic artillery? Why did we have to waste so
many men on the ground when we have such modern
weapons which are supposed to make war so much cheaper
and easier to fight?

These are the easiest questions of all to answer.

Korea is a tiny country, as countries go, and relatively
backward. Its Japanese conquerors had built railroads and a
few highways in order to simplify the task of milking the
country of die rice, fish, and minerals they wanted from it.
But the average Korean still lives much as his ancestors did.
He has no car or truck, or access to one. When he has some-
thing heavy to haul, even over a great distance, he simply
bends over, shoves the load onto his strong back, and starts
plodding down the road. Korea's startling ability to produce
championship distance runners is due largely to the fact that
her young people are used to miming, not riding or cycling,
when they are in a hurry. They have a reserve supply of
stamina.

Korea is a backward country. But it is also a tough and
resilient country. And its very backwardness served the
enemy well. In fact the enemy's ways at times were so ob-
solete and crude that our modern superweapons were on an
entirely different level. The two opposing ways of life just
did not meet and the two sides were often poorly matched.
We were too modern. We counted too much on our fast
planes and our big machines of war. We could hurt the
enemy, but he always found ways to minimize the punch.
Then, when we weren't looking, the enemy in his very back-

SXJBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 55

wardness was able to bounce back and start all over again.
Where we were powerful, he was merely rugged. Where we
had the mobility to move fast, he was plodding and deter-
mined. But most important, he was resourceful and clever
enough to turn these disadvantages to his own purpose, and
to react against us on a cultural level so much lower than
ours, and on a mechanical level so much slower, that we
could barely reach him, much less destroy him.

For example, when the enemy decided to raise some hell
around Seoul by harassing the area with his own airpower,
he did not send down modern jet bombers which would
flash over us in a second and hammer us with bombs and
rockets before we knew it. If he had done that, we probably
could have stopped him. For we had sleek jet interceptors
standing by just for that purpose, and an extensive ring of
radar warning stations to tell us of his approach. But he
fooled us. Instead of using jets he got out some slow, old,
propeller-driven crates which would have made us laugh had
we seen him getting them ready. And then, instead of using
rockets or bombs the planes were too small and ancient-
he put a man in the rear cockpit with an armful of mortar
shells and a burp gun. After dark, he flew these improvised
bombers down to Seoul He came in too low for our radar
screens to pick him up another clever trick. (If he had used
jets he would necessarily have come in high, where he would
have been detected.) Instead he hedgehopped in over the
bilk surrounding Seoul and dropped mortar shells all over the
place. Later, emboldened by his success, he improved this
technique and sent down a few real bombs, with which he
blew a hole disturbingly close to Syngman RheeTs residence
and caused a fuel dump at Inchon to explode in costly flames.

It was a huge surprise, and we didn't know whether to
laugh or get sore. The U. S. Air Force people were inclined

56

to be sore, for this made them look pretty silly. Here they
were, just itching for a chance to use their newly improved
night interceptors. But the enemy planes were too old-
fashioned for us to attack with our jets. You have to track an
enemy plane to shoot him down especially at night when
you can't see him and have got to get him located in your
radar sight before you can pull the trigger. But if you're
flying a jet, which goes several hundred miles an hour, you
cannot possibly track a little enemy crate that is flying only
a hundred miles an hour. If you do, youTl run right past it
before you ever get your sights set

To catch up with or rather slow down to the enemy's
Bedcheck Charlies (so named because they woke everyone
up at bedtime), we had to turn the clock back a war or two
and unmodernize ourselves. We got out some of our old train-
ers and put machine guns in them. We also called up the
Navy and asked them if they could loan the Air Force some
of the slow old dive bombers they still kept aboard their
carriers for flying extra-heavy bomb loads. The Navy said
sure, and sent some of their seagoing planes to Seoul.

One night, when the Air Force pilots were all sitting
around on their bunks chewing their nails because they had
only fast planes to fly, a Navy lieutenant went up and became
an ace the Navy's first in Korea by shooting down his fifth
Bedcheck Charlie. The Air Force had gotten over feeling silly
by this time, but it all went to prove that the most powerful
outfit (or nation) with the fastest planes isn't necessarily the
one that's destined to win. It was a little like the race be-
tween the hare and the tortoise.

A more serious example of our inability because of our
modernity to defeat the enemy because of his backward-
nessalso involved the Air Force.

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 37

Our airpower in Korea was immense, and it was superbly
co-ordinated. The top commander, with headquarters in
Seoul, conveniently across the street from Eighth Army, tad
at his disposal not only the fighters and fighter bombers of
the Fifth Air Force but also the planes the Marines had
brought to Korea to support the ground activities of the 1st
Marine Division, as well as the planes the Navy had on its
carriers with Task Force 77, out in the Sea of Japan.

This combination of striking power was controlled from
one room in Fifth Air Force headquarters. Here, staff officers
of the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, and the Marines sat
together over the same maps to co-ordinate the daily attacks.
They divided the work into missions for each service, and
traded planes around whenever the situation was critical. It
was a perfect example of unification at work in a war area.

The Sabre jets were assigned mostly to flying patrols to the
Yalu and back. There they constituted a kind of mobile fence
against the MIGs, to make sure the enemy jets were kept in-
volved over the Yalu and did not get down into North Korea,
where they could harass our other planes as they carried out
bombing missions. The Sabres had orders never to cross the
Yalu, for the officers in charge felt they had a big enough
war on their hands as it was, without becoming involved in
a bigger one in Manchuria. The Sabres flew up to the border,
hoping, of course, for trouble. Whenever a MIG pilot was
eager for a scrap or was ordered over to get some fighting
experience, the Sabres were glad to oblige.

The MIGs, which had only to take off from their bases
across the Yalu and gain altitude to be in fighting position,
had a decided advantage in fuel consumption over our own
pilots, who had to fly some three hundred miles from their
bases just to get to the arena. This meant the MIGs could
afford to play around in the air, feeling us out, a good deal

58

longer than we could stay there. Sometimes our pilots had
time only to make one or two quick passes before their fuel
ran low and they were obliged to skip the fight and head for
home. The Sabre was a good plane, but it was heavier than
the MIG partially because we valued our pilots* lives and
added extra safety devices. And though a Sabre could out-
maneuver a MIG, the latter was usually able, because of his
lighter weight, to outclimb our plane.

Besides these technical and geographical advantages, the
MIG pilot always called the play. Unless he came over and
dared us to fight, we never got a crack at him. We could not
go over into his yard. And yet we were able to account for
823 MIGs shot down, while the enemy got only 58 of our
Sabres. It was a magnificent victory.

We were not so successful or so fortunate, however, in
other phases of the air war. While the Sabres were keeping
the MIGs isolated behind the Yalu, staff officers in the Joint
Operations Control room in Seoul were assigning the fighter
bombers at their disposal including Marine and Navy planes
to other missions: enemy supply depots we'd spotted from
the air or learned about from agents; railroad and highway
bridges; enemy supply traffic; concentrations of enemy troops
in rear areas, to break them up before they reached the front;
and, when the tactical occasion called for it, strafing and
bombing missions along the front line itself, to help the
ground troops out of a tight spot. By co-ordinating every
mission in that one room in Seoul, the Air Force was able
to get maximum use of its airpower. If a flight of Navy
bombers was known to be headed for a bridge in the enemy's
rear area, for example a plotting board kept the staff in-
formed of the whereabouts of each flight it could be called
off this assignment in mid-air and diverted to a front-line

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 59

mission where an enemy attack had suddenly broken out and
the troops needed instant support. If a flight of Marine planes
happened to be closer to the front-line action, the Navy
would continue with its rail mission and JOG (Joint Opera-
tions Control) would divert the Marines from whatever mis-
sion they had started on and send them to the front. Whether
the beleaguered ground troops were Marines, U. S. Army,
ROKs, or Ethiopians didn't matter. The important thing was
to make TnaYfrmrm and instantaneous use of our airpower
against the enemy.

During those long periods when the war was in a static
state and the troops were not engaged in pitched battle,
most of the air missions were scheduled against enemy sup-
plies and bridges far to the enemy's rear. This policy annoyed
a number of ground force commanders including some high
generals who accused the Air Force of ignoring its tactical
mission, which they felt should be the direct and immediate
support of their ground troops.

Air Force officers argued back with a good deal of sense,
I think that it was far better to destroy the enemy's replace-
ments and supplies in the rear, before they ever reached the
front, than it was to wait until the enemy troops were hurl-
ing these things at us at twenty paces. The air officers also
pointed out that there was little their planes could do to help
the ground troops so long as the situation remained static.
The enemy was dug in deeply, sometimes in trenches and
bunkers three layers deep. Only a direct hit with a huge
bomb a rare combination on such small targets could have
hurt them. It would be better, the Air Force conceded, if the
ground troops used their own artillery and mortars to ham-
mer away at such nearby targets and free the planes for
tackling other targets, farther to the rear, for which the plane
was the only weapon available. The air officers felt that

60

their weapon the airplane should be reserved for targets
the ground force could not reach, and that the plane's
special assets speed and range could best be used be-
yond the battlefield, not over it. There was no strategic
air force in Korea. It was not that kind of war. The planes
we had there had to fight both kinds of air war: tactical and
strategic.

So long as both sides were in their holes, facing each other,
there was little the Air Force could do from a practical stand-
point. Planes are effective against enemy troops only when
they are attacking in concert with our own troops. When our
men were on the assault, routing the enemy from his holes
and making Tn'm run, then the planes could come in and
splatter the enemy in the open. But so long as we were fight-
ing a static, dug-in war there were no miracles, the Air Force
admitted, that it could produce.

I once spent several weeks at Fifth Air Force headquarters
in Seoul, watching the plotting maps as the staff officers as-
signed the missions and then comparing the assigned targets
with the results when the aerial photographs of the bomb
damage began to flow through for analysis. This was during
the winter of 1951-52 when the Air Force was engaged in
an extensive campaign of destruction which someone in
Washington had given the unfortunate nickname "Opera-
tion Strangle." The thesis was that here was Korea, a narrow
little peninsula with only a given number of roads and rail-
road lines, each with so many bridges. And there were the
enemy troops, dug in along the front like moles. If we could
not hit them effectively, we could at least see to it that they
got as little in the way of ammunition, food, and guns as pos-
sible. We already had bombed every building in North

SUBSTJLTUTK FOR VICTORY 61

Korea that might conceivably be producing bullets, hand
grenades, or rifles. Trained photo-interpreters were strain-
ing their eyes to spot all the camouflaged supply dumps
scattered through the valleys and villages of North Korea.
We would continue to plaster those places, to make sure they
did not get back into operation. The only juicy target left
for us was the enemy's one remaining source of materials;
his transportation network.

We were already hitting that too, of course, but the plan
was for us to step up our attack and go about it more system-
atically. The ammunition the enemy was throwing at us from
his front-line positions might have been manufactured in
Russia or China, where we could not get at it without biting
off more than we could then chew. But before this material
got to the front, and down into the holes with the soldiers,
it had to make a long, bumpy trip in a truck over narrow
mountain roads or a long, snaillike jaunt in a North Korean
railroad car. AD. we'd have to do to put the squeeze on the
enemy would be to concentrate on those bridges, highways,
and railroads we had not already knocked out We might not
stop everything. But at least, we thought, we could slow the
flow to a trickle. And then, if our ground troops could bluff
the enemy into using up what he had left in his holes and
what little he continued to receive, we might have hi-m licked.
After all, it was a narrow peninsula. We might just choke
him to death. We just might "strangle" him*

In all fairness, it should be explained that few Air Force
officers in Seoul thought at the start that we could really
choke the enemy to death. But they did believe we could
hurt him, and they went about the operation with real zeal.
An entire section of the headquarters building was set aside
for a task force which kept track, on its maps and aerial

62

photos, of every railroad car and engine in North Korea. If
anything was moved, we knew it, and where. Then the trans-
portation system was divided up into sections, and the officers
began the systematic assignment of missions to knock these
sections out, one at a time.

"This may sound dull to you," said the briefing officers to
the pilots, '"but believe us, if you do this job you may help to
end the war.** It did sound dull to the pilots, who would much
rather have been aiming their guns and bombs at live enemy
troops they could see hit the dust. And they became dizzy,
as they ran up and down the enemy zone, following the
curving tracks and the winding roads looking for transport.
But the zeal in headquarters caught on. Individual units
started races to see who could knock out the most track in
one week. And posters went up in every air-base shack with
the proud slogan, "WeVe been working on the railroads."

But it was the tortoise and the hare all over again.

Day after day we sent fighter bombers against the enemy's
bridges, roadbeds, and marshaling yards. We plastered every
mile of railroad in sight. In some places we cut the track
with bombs every few yards, just to make sure we had
mangled it for good. We broke bridges at both ends and in
the middle. We waited until trains ran into mountain tunnels
to hide, then we caved the tunnels in on both ends and cut
the rails leading into them for good measure.

At night, light bombers took over and cruised up and down
the highways, searching for truck convoys. Every now and
then they'd catch a line of trucks just before the drivers
heard the planes and had a chance to switch off their head-
lights. For fifteen minutes or so the planes would take turns
running up and down over the stalled convoy, blowing it
apart with bombs and strafing the ditches along the road to
get the drivers hiding there. Thousands of trucks, according

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 63

to the Air Force which claimed it underestimated its kills-
went up in flames every week.

Then, on the following day, we sent out reconnaissance
planes to bring back aerial photographs as evidence of the
damage. I saw many of these aerials and the results were
impressive. Twisted rails and mangled boxcars lay scattered
over mile after mile of track. Huge holes straddled the nar-
row mountain highways. Bridges and smoking railroad en-
gines lay in wreckage.

The enemy soon proved how badly we were hurting Trim.
In a few short weeks he hustled hundreds of anti-aircraft
guns down from Russia and planted them along every im-
portant route. He set up fake headlights on the sides of steep
mountains to lure our night bombers in for a run and a crash.
He set up phony engines along the track to entice us into
ack-ack traps. Hie cost to us of carrying on the operation
went up astronomically. And we lost planes (974 altogether,
some 600 to ground fire) at a rapid rate as the enemy anti-
aircraft gunners with Russian technical advice, if not actual
triggering began to get a good lead even on our fast jets.
We lost bomber pilots too including General Van Meet's
own son.

The enemy resorted to other clever tricks to counterattack
our war on his life line. He built bridges across streams just
under the water level, where he hoped we wouldn't spot
them in our photographs. At one place, after neatly knock-
ing out the center span of an important railroad bridge, we
went back day after day to make sure the enemy was not re-
placing the span. There was no sign of work, and we merely
continued to keep an eye on it. Then one night, on a hunch,
we photographed the bridge after dark, using a parachute
flare to light the picture. There on the picture, big as life, was
a train chugging across the bridge with a trail of smoke curl-

64

ing up from the engine. We got out our daylight pictures and
studied them again. Sure enough, on a siding near the bridge
we spotted a flatcar. And on closer inspection we saw that the
flatcar held a portable span. Every night the enemy had
trundled the flatcar onto the bridge, lowered the span into
place, and gone into business again, removing the span just
before dawn so we would not see it during our daily check.

Fortunately for the enemy, the Japanese had built a double
track over the most important sections of the railroad line.
When we bombed these stretches he merely switched to
single track and cannibalized the extra rails to keep it going.
The rails were so thin that in many cases they could easily be
bent back into shape and relaid in place, sometimes even
without ties.

The enemy's best counterattack against our campaign of
attrition lay in the size, the cheapness, and the availability of
his supply of manpower. He organized entire villages of
North Koreansmen, women, and children along the rail
and truck routes, and he kept them standing by throughout
the night with their shovels and picks to make repairs. We
usually sent our planes in just before dusk, to hit him as late
as possible. The planes cut the track to pieces with bombs
and left mile after mile of track or roadbed so full of holes
it looked like a punchboard. But as soon as the planes had
left, the enemy rushed his road gangs to the site and worked
them so hard that before dawn when we returned he had
filled in enough holes and laid enough rail to get at least one
train across. Because the track was flimsy it would have to
be a slow train. And it would have to meander across so many
fields and curl around so many deep holes that the engineer
must have become dizzy from the motion. But the train
would get through, and with it went enough supplies to keep
the enemy going at the front for at least another day or two.

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 65

It was a battle of airpower against massed, cheap man-
powerand shovelpower. And though the unrelenting pace
of the bombing hurt the enemy severely, slowing his flow of
supplies to a crawl and destroying thousands of his rails, box-
cars, engines, and Russian-built trucks, it did not lick him. I
heard a frustrated Air Force colonel say one day, in the midst
of the uphill battle, "If we could only find out where he
makes his shovels we'd have him." But even this was wish-
ful thinking. The enemy would have used his hands; and he
had more hands than we had bombs.

Sometimes we did succeed in stymieing him. We'd bomb
a mountain pass which he could not easily M in, or destroy a
bridge he could not replace. But even then the enemy had a
solution. He merely unloaded the trucks or the train, parceled
the supplies into 50- or 100-pound loads, and hoisted them
on the backs of several thousand fanners he had standing by.
Each farmer had an A-frame on his back a simple carrying
platform made of rope and wood which the Korean coolie
has used for centuries. When the farmers were loaded with
as much as they could cany, they'd wind their way down a
narrow footpath around the bombed-out railroad or find a
ford across the river, and portage the ammunition, the rice,
or even the dismantled fieldpieces for ten or twenty miles to
a spot where another train or truck convoy would take them
aboard and shuttle them on to the front.

The airplane was not designed to cope with the A-frame,
The battle of airpower (the use of trained, valuable pilots)
versus manpower (the use of dispensable human draft an-
imals) was not an efficient squaring off of weapons, or of
cultures. We could have continued the campaign indefinitely,
but unless we were really getting someplace, unless we were
using up our strength in a winning situation, there was not
much point to it especially when we were also giving the

66

enemy an extensive course in ack-ack gunnery, with our own
planes for target practice.

"Operation Strangle" was a worth-while try on our part.
But perhaps in this instance we did sustain a defeat if it is
an act of defeat merely to find oneself on the wrong end of
an unsolvable mathematical equation.

Why didn't we use the atomic bomb on all those people?
Why didn't we subtract several million North Koreans with
a series of explosions and turn the equation around?

We did not use the atomic bomb in Korea simply because
there was no target for it. Our decision had nothing to do
with the question of the morality or the immorality involved
in using atomic weapons. We were already killing so many
people, piecemeal, with everyday bombs and bullets that we
might as well have increased the ratio and done it all at once.
But there was no way to bring the bomb to bear. The cities
of North Korea had all been bombed into desolation earlier,
and no atomic bomb could have knocked them any flatter.
The military targets which remained in North Korea were
so scattered and deeply dug in in caves and underground
workshops that the bomb would only have been wasted. The
atomic bomb is a shock weapon. It is a specialized weapon
requiring a special target. There must, first of all, be enough
people collected within the area to make the bomb worth
considering as the correct, most efficient weapon. And the
area must be enclosed, either by mountains or buildings, so
that the highly concentrated force of the shock waves will
have full effect. Even as a psychological weapon, dropped
to frighten the populace into submission, the bomb must
create such staggering desolation on its first dropping that
the people will have cause to fear more. In Korea, where
there was already so much desolation and where the targets

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 67

were dispersed too far for any one bomb to be effective, the
atomic bomb would have added insult but not extensive
injury.

By day, North Korea was a wasteland. The population was
hidden in countless farmhouses and tiny villages outside the
devastated cities. Many of them had moved into deep caves,
where they carried on small-scale industry. Our reconnais-
sance pilots sometimes flew over the area day after day with-
out seeing a sign of life or a target worth recording. At night,
of course, the country came alive. Troops moved down by
single file to the front, hustling along in order to make an-
other village hiding place before dawn. Trucks crept along
with their lights off, scheduling their drive so they, too, could
reach a tunnel or a series of underground parking areas be-
fore our planes caught them. Groups of one or two thousand
people were clustered along the railroad lines, hurriedly toss-
ing dirt and re-laying rails so that a train could sneak across
before the night was over. We could, and did, bomb and
strafe all these people when we could find them in the dark.
But we did not stop them. They kept right on going, asking
for more. They were so well knit by their Communist masters
that no amount of nightly pounding from us ever broke their
will or scared them into quitting. Even if we had been able
to aim an atomic bomb at one or two of these relatively small
and scattered groups and a small bomb would have sufficed
we would not have deterred other groups from keeping at
their job.

The A-bomb, powerful as it is, was no match for the end-
less and amorphous procession through the night of A-frames.

The same principle was true regarding the use of atomic
artillery. It is a fine weapon for obliterating large masses of
troops who are caught in the open, in a relatively enclosed

68

area. But even the "hordes" of enemy soldiers who overran
our positions consisted, as targets, of separate companies and
platoons. They came at us up the deep ravines and out of the
intricate crisscrossing of hills and valleys which make up the
Korean terrain. And they came from all directions. Atomic
shells would have heen useful only had we been able to catch
the enemy while he was still in his assembly areas, before he
divided his men up into the separate assault teams. Unfor-
tunately the enemy was not in the habit of letting us know
when and where he was assembled. And by the time we
knew he was coming it would have been too late to use
atomic artillery* In the attack, the enemy would be pro-
tected by the valleys and Trills through which he crawled,
and which would have deflected and muffled much of the
blast. He would also, by that time, be so close to our own
positions that we could not have aimed atomic shells at him
without endangering our own men.

Atomic weapons are devastating but they are not miracle
weapons. They can be used only under certain conditions.
The battle situation in Korea did not provide these condi-
tions.

Why did we not at least bomb across the Yalu, and deny
the enemy his sanctuary there?

I once asked a high Air Force general that question, and I
pass along his frank answer: We could have bombed targets
in Manchuria, from a technical point of view, almost any time
we wanted to. That is, we had the planes and the bombs.
We did not always have the air. In the midst of the war we
had to shift from daylight bombing of North Korea to night
bombing, using instruments to find our targets. The reason
for this was that the enemy's jet fighters were so numerous
that they were sneaking across the border in broad daylight

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 69

despite our Sabre fence and shooting down our slow B-29s.
Our jet fighter bombers, however, which were on other mis-
sions, were able to continue, though not unscathed.

But even if our large bombers had been able to bomb
freely by daylight, there was no compelling reason for our
extending their flights from North Korea into Manchuria.
We could probably have chased the annoying MIGs away
from their base at Anju, and we could have hit all kinds of
supply dumps and marshaling areas and transportation facil-
ities to further increase the pressure on the enemy's supply
system.

But these benefits would not have been worth the extra
cost, which would have been tremendous. The MIGs would
merely have moved to other fields; and even though the
MIGs were able to force us to give up much of our daylight
bombing of North Korea, our officers felt it was better to
shift to night bombing and try to avoid them rather than run
the risk of expanding the war by going after them on their
home bases. As for the enemy's supplies, it was more efficient
to tackle them after they got into the narrow bottleneck of
Korea itself than it was to chase them all over the broad ex-
panse of Manchuria. If we could not strangle tiny Korea, we
could hardly knock out Asia.

The bombing of Manchuria would not only have meant
extending the war ( and straining the bonds with some of our
allies who were opposed to such a project) but it would also
have meant extending our own effort beyond the limits of
practicality. The real strategic targets of this war the truck
factories, the main arsenals, the plane plants, and all the
other more important sources of the enemy's long-term
strength were not in Manchuria at all They were even
farther out of reach, in China and in Russia. We had enough
on our hands trying to seal off a small peninsula and cope

70

with the A-frame without opening up a new and even larger
phase of the war a phase which might not hurt the enemy
nearly so much as it would extend ourselves.

Korea was a tough nut. And there were no short cuts to
the cracking of it.

V

BESIDES the military lesson which Korea taught us-that
the biggest, most modern, and best equipped nation is not
necessarily destined, per se 9 to win all its battles we also
learned a basic lesson in geopolitics which is a corollary to
the military lesson: when two major forces are squared off
against each other, as the free world and the Communist
world were opposed in Korea, it requires more than token
combat, no matter how determined, skillful, and morally
sound it may be, to carry the day.
We have been lucky in our wars. We were successful

72

against Germany on two different occasions. And we de-
feated the Japanese. As a result of these successes we came
dangerously close to taking our luck for granted. We came
to think of war as a decisive game, in which one side or the
other and by this we really assumed our side always won.
We went into Korea with our most recent victories still fresh
in our minds, and that is one reason the war there was so
frustrating.

We did not "win 9 * in Korea. And we were disturbed when
General MacArthur, with whom we associate so much of
our previous military infallibility and rightly so warned,
concerning Korea, that "there is no substitute for victory.'*

There is no substitute, of course, when one is engaged in
an all-out, fight-or-die struggle, when the war is total and all
the chips are down. Against the Germans and the Japanese,
who were on the rampage and were playing for keeps, there
could have been no substitute for victory. We were in those
wars all the way; we had reached the finals, and the cham-
pionshipour physical existence was at stake. We had to
win or die in the attempt.

We also went to war against Germany and Japan at a
time when the rest of the world was as equally determined
as we to stop them. Germany had made the mistake of tak-
ing on too much of the world at once. And hers was a
blatant and arrogant mission: to Germanize the world. It
was a useless, inexcusable mission. It did not even have the
saving grace of claiming to forward a political idea. Unlike
Russia who tries, with some success, to camouflage her
mission as a crusade to undo the economic wrongs of the
world Germany had nothing to offer the world except a dis-
gusting display of racialism. The world was nauseated at the
sight, and because it was a stronger world in those days and
had not been bled white of its manpower and its will, it was

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 73

not difficult to muster a concentrated alliance of power
against the Nazis. Once Germany was ringed on all sides by
powerful armies and one glance at a map will show the
difficulty, if not the impossibility, of repeating this tactic
against the land mass of China and Russia she was finished.

The Japanese, the most industrialized and "modernized"
nation of Asia, took us on in a similar match. Again the chal-
lenge was total and demanded a total response. We won
again, because we were able to concentrate enough force to
defeat an enemy who had challenged our very existence.

We were successful in both these wars because we were
able to bring to bear a preponderance of power against two
enemies who had staked everything they had. The U.S.
started late, but because of our industrial genius we were
able to outstrip both nations at once in the production of the
guns, ships, planes, bullets, and bombs needed to bring them
to their knees. And we took that immense gamble with our
materials and our men because the crisis had reached its
peak danger point. There were no preliminaries. Had we
stopped the Japanese in Manchuria in 1931, or nipped Ger-
many's mad mission in the bud when she entered the
Sudetenland in 1938, we might have saved ourselves count-
less troubles and thousands of lives later on.

That, of course, is why we had to go to Korea. We had
learned, against both Germany and Japan, whom we chal-
lenged only when the finals rolled around, that it is best,
if only from a training standpoint, to get in on the prelim-
inaries when we can. We learn the enemy's tactics that way,
and we are better prepared to oppose him if he should choose
to challenge us later in a showdown match.

Korea was a preliminary. The enemy, by his very choice of
that tiny, insignificant country as a battleground, made it so.
If he had wanted to defeat us, militarily, and take the cham-

74

pionship title immediately, he would not have chosen Korea.
He would have chosen, instead, to push his strength in in-
dustrial Germany or in some other more centrally located and
more indispensable arena perhaps even America where we
would have had to respond to him, as we did against Ger-
many and Japan, with all our power. And he would have
had to do the same. He would have had to summon all his
resources and all his planes and armies in an attempt to crush
us for good.

It is obvious that the enemy does not relish such a conflict.
Instead, he has taken the expedient action of picking on us in
little jabs, in small, isolated places like Korea and Indo-China
and perhaps more to come where we cannot possibly come
to grips with him. We have to respond, for he is clever
enough to choose sensitive spots we cannot let go by def ault.
But he knows when he starts the battle that it will not be-
come a death trap for him. His only hope is that we will be
sucked so far into a series of little wars and commit so much
of our determination and strength in trying to "win" them
that we will soon tire and collapse of our own exertion.

We could no more defeat Communism in Korea than the
enemy could defeat democracy there. It was too small a
battleground on which to settle such a huge conflict. And we
could no more have defeated Communism on the peninsula
of Korea just because we happened to be engaged there
with some Communist forces than we could have defeated
Nazism down on the peninsula of Italy or the Japanese down
in New Guinea. We had to enter Germany itself to cut out
the roots of Nazism the steel mills which supplied its armies
and the people who blindly supported them. We had to lie
off the shores of Japan, after tackling most of the stepping-
stones in between, before she finally gave up. Similarly, if we
are ever to attempt a final pitched battle against Commu-

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 75

nism, we shall have to bring to bear all the military power we
have on Russia herself, and on Red China too. That is a for-
midable job even to think about. We are definitely not pre-
pared for it yet. The fires axe not that hot, and there are still
enough alternatives to an all-consuming conflict that we can
afford to hope, a little at least, that such a battle will never
come off.

That is why we had to stop where and when we did in
Korea. There was no point in straining ourselves any further.
We had accomplished the mission we assigned ourselves
when we took on North Korea: we had stuck it out through
three years of fantastically difficult and bloody warfare. We
had proved we were willing to fight. But unless we were pre-
pared for the finals, for an all-out war against Russia and
China themselves, we were wasting whatever energy and
power we continued to apply in Korea. As any experienced
fighter knows, preliminaries are not supposed to be fifteen-
round bouts, and for good reasons.

To have fought on in Korea would have been a little like
trying to kill a lively and hostile octopus by hacking away at
just one of its tentacles instead of at its brain. It might have
been the braver and more impressive thing to do, to go on
hacking away in Korea. But discretion in war, as in other en-
deavors, is the better part of valor. I have known a number
of heroes who have won dozens of medals for their military
exploits. But in most cases I have noticed that the hero, at the
moment when he performed the brave and fearless act for
which the world applauded him, was practically devoid of
judgment and discretion. He was angry and in his anger he
was willing to risk his life rather than live to fight another
day. Heroes are the catalysts of warfare, and when a nation is
in trouble it needs all the brave, foolhardy men it can find to
man the bunkers and fly the riskier missions. And they de-

76

serve all the honors we can bestow on them. But if the nation
itself becomes foolhardy, and in its frustration engages en
masse in an unnecessary tampering with the odds, it may
find itself carrying its valor indiscreetly dose to the edge of
suicide. Discretion is not only the better part of valor. Ac-
cording to Euripides, "Discretion is valor. A daring pilot is
dangerous to his ship/*

When President-elect Eisenhower arrived in Korea for his
inspection trip, he spent three days visiting division and
corps command posts, saw a demonstration of ROK training
methods, and was briefed constantly by the generals who
were in command of the war. Correspondents were not priv-
ileged to attend the President's private briefings, but from
the facts that were generally known at the time, I have recon-
structed the following outline of what the generals probably
told hfm. I was briefed on most of these facts myself by one
of General Clark's highest staff officers:

1. We could, with enough men and supplies, push the
enemy back to the Yalu.

2. Or, if that were considered unnecessary to our cause, we
could, at least, inflict heavy damage on the enemy forces then
in Korea.

3. We could, in order to accomplish this, break through the
enemy's front line and chew up his forces. It would be a for-
midable task. And it would require a much larger force than
we had in Korea at the time. During the long stalemate pe-
riods, when both sides had been trying to come to terms, the
enemy had hedged his bet on peace and had so improved his
positions that when Eisenhower visited Korea the enemy was
dug in along the front in a solid interlocking series of forti-
fications twenty miles in depth. (Considering the cost,
against massed enemy artillery and his unlimited manpower,

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 77

of taking just one hill a thousand yards to our front, it is not
difficult to imagine the problem of trying to penetrate twenty
miles of enemy positions.) The generals told Eisenhower that
to crack this line which we would have to do if we were to
attempt to roll back the enemy would require sustaining an
estimated 50,000 casualties.

4. Once we had broken through, we would need additional
men, to replace those casualties and to beef up our units for
the extensive job of mopping up and following our attack
through to a final victory. We would have to keep moving
north, of course, in order to keep the enemy on the run and
prevent him from regrouping for a coimterattack. We would
take additional casualties during this operation, not so high,
perhaps, as those required for breaching the line.

5. We might iwt be able to pull off another end run as suc-
cessful as the operation MacArthur produced at Xjichoru We
caught the enemy off balance on that one, and unprepared.
We had also taught him a lesson. As a result, he now had
plenty of reserves scattered all the way from his front lines to
the Yalu, organized and equipped to counter any attempt on
our part to outflank hi from the rear. We could try to pull
off a landing but it might not be nearly so successful as In-
chon, and certainly it would be expensive in lives.

6. In order to defeat the enemy in Korea, we would have to
combine a concerted frontal attack, as outlined in Item 3,
with a landing, as in Item 5. This, of course, would result in
sustaining a combination of the casualties we would suffer in
either operation. And at the same time we could expect the
enemy to beef up his own forces with troops he had standing
by in China. The war would not be won or over by any
means.

7. We could try all this, however, the commanding generals
told Eisenhower, if he but gave the word and provided the

78

necessary men and supplies. (It should be pointed out here
that generals are paid to fight, not to think up reasons for
avoiding a fight. This was the only war we had, and it is
natural that the generals in command of it, in Tokyo and
Seoul, whose profession is warfare, should have thought in
terms of continuing it. It might also be pointed out that Presi-
dent Eisenhower, who was once a commanding general him-
self, was familiar with this military psychology and un-
doubtedly took it into account. )

If the generals thought they had convinced him we should
fight on, however, they were wrong. For when the President-
elect flew home and had been inaugurated, he sent back
word that the delegates at Panmunjom were to proceed with
their endeavor to reach an armistice, and that they should
make early arrangements to bring home the sick and
wounded prisoners. He agreed, apparently, with Euripides.
He would be a safe rather than a "daring" pilot. He would
bring the Korean war to an honorable conclusion and
husband our strength, our power, and our lives for some
future and, he hoped, more advantageous time and place to
apply them.

The line we finally halted on is probably the best place in
Korea for us to hole up. The so-called MacArthur Line, across
the narrow waist of Korea, has received a great deal of pub-
licity. And because it is shorter it is generally referred to as a
better, cheaper line to maintain. However, it is one hundred
miles farther north, and though this would give us one hun-
dred extra miles of Korea with which to placate Syngman
Bice's ardent desire for unification, it would also give us an
extra hundred miles of severe military headaches.

Had we pushed the enemy farther north, we would have
done so at the cost of giving Vrirn an advantage and ourselves

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 79

a disadvantage. For one thing, we would have extended our
own supply line by a hundred miles. We would have had to
haul our rations, our ammunition stocks, and our new men an
extra hundred miles beyond where we now have to haul them
to get them to our defensive positions. And at the same time
we would have shortened the enemy's supply lines for him.
He would have one hundred less miles of roads and railroads
over which he had to supply his troops. Moving north, then,
would have made our job more difficult and his a good deal
easier. And we would have sustained the afore-mentioned
losses just pushing our line up in the first place. There did
not seem to be much point in that. We would also be stuck,
as a result, with the responsibility of occupying some ten
thousand square miles of territory which the enemy had held
before and which we had wrecked with our bombs. To pre-
vent civil unrest, disease, and economic chaos we would have
been obliged to rebuild it all ourselves. There would not have
been much, point in taking on that extra chore either.

In addition to all this, we would have placed ourselves one
hundred miles nearer the enemy's sanctuary across the Yalu.
We would be that much closer to his MIG bases, and thus in
greater danger of air attack should the war be resumed.

We are sitting now on a line that is reasonably safe from
attack by the enemy s MIGs. The MIG, like all jets, is a high-
altitude plane. It performs efficiently in the rarefied atmos-
phere of twenty or thirty thousand feet, and it uses mfnfmmm
fuel at a high altitude. But once it descends and a plane
would have to come down on the deck, of course, to an altf-
* tude of a few hundred feet to strafe or bomb ground troops-
it begins to bum fuel so fast, because of the higher oxygen
content at that level, that its range is cut down tremendously.
Where we sit now, manning our wall against Communism,
the MIG cannot come down, attack our positions, and have

80

enough fuel left over to return safely to its bases on the Yalu.
We are just out of reach. Had we gone farther north we
would have lessened that advantage. There would not have
been much point in that.

There is the possibility, of course, that the enemy will
move his jets down into Korea anyway now that the shooting
is over. We can no longer deny him these bases, as we did
during the war, by bombing them out as fast as he builds
them. We saw this contingency coining, and in the truce talks
we tried to avoid it by writing into the agreement a stipula-
tion that neither side should be allowed to build or even im-
prove its air bases once the truce began. (While we argued
for this stipulation, we set up flares and torches and worked
nights to complete all the work we needed on our bases, so we
would not be caught short by our own rule.) But the enemy
turned the stipulation down on the grounds that no military
armistice commission (and he pointed out that Panmunjom
was purely a military affair) had the right to interfere in any
way with the "civil" affairs of North Korea. If the North
Koreans wished to build "civilian" airfields after the truce,
said Nam II, that was their business. We had no right, he
repeated, to interfere with their internal affairs simply be-
cause we had signed a truce with their armies. It was a clever
and rather unanswerable position, and we finally had to ac-
cede.

We have had to give up a number of other valuable ad-
vantages. We had secret islands far up along both coasts-
one right off Wonsan Harbor from which we carried on
radar warning operations and intelligence raids and from
which we flew helicopters to rescue our pilots who had been
shot down. Often, while our fighter planes held off enemy
troops, the helicopters hovered over a downed pilot in the
very heart of North Korea and lifted him right out from

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 81

under the nose of an enemy division. The islands from which
the copters operated had to be given up because they were
situated north of the truce line which was agreed to by both
sides. If we ever need them again we shall probably have to
take them back by force. And if the war resumes in Korea
we shall probably do just that, for the islands were invalu-
able.

We also had to give up our aerial reconnaissance flights
over North Korea since they would have constituted a hos-
tile act and would have given the enemy an excuse, if he
needed one, to disobey the rules of the truce himself. We
have no new aerial photographs, now, on which to spot his
activities. Oar only check on the enemy and his only check
on us (outside of agents) consists of teams of neutral ob-
servers who are designated by the truce agreement as ref-
erees. These observers are supposed to roam both sides of the
fence and make sure that neither side increases the military
potential he had when the war ended.

We still have agents in North Korea there being no way a
neutral observer can spot an agent who will continue to
keep us at least slightly abreast of the enemy's movements
and advised of his war potential at any given moment.

And the double agents will continue to find a way to come
and go, regardless of the neutral buffer zone we have drawn
across the mountains with strands of barbed wire and warn-
ing signs spelled out in three languages English, Korean,
and Chinese.

We shall not be able to relax. And we shall have to keep
our men in Korea for a long time to come, dug in along the
front and ready for action. But the price for our alertness will
not be so high. The men will be able to fly to Tokyo a little
oftener to drink the good Japanese beer and buy gay kimonos
for their girl friends. They will also be able to stand up in the

82

noonday sun in Korea and strip down to their white T-shirts
or to their bare skin without worrying about the enemy's
using their unarmored bodies for target practice. They will
not be content, and their parents at home will worry about
them and wonder why they should have to sit out in Korea at
all when the war there is over. But they will be alive. They at
least will not be sitting in some crowded enemy prison camp
or lie buried in the U.N. cemetery at Pusan. And they will
be serving a good and necessary purpose. Japan and Korea
will be safe. We will have two footholds in Asia which we
would not have if we had defaulted in June 1951. There will
be two less places we would have to take back for our own
protection, at some future and deadlier date, when the price
would have been even higher.
We will have our wall.

VI

IT WAS a good war.

We got our jet air force into being. We learned how to
fight a jet war, against both enemy jet planes and enemy tar-
gets on the ground. We worked out bugs in our planes and
hastened a number of improvements in jet design as a result
of battle tests in Korea. We gave our jet pilots the realistic
kind of training, against live targets and tricky enemy pilots,
which they would never have had otherwise. They defeated
the enemy jet force in the air, and they performed the invalu-
able service of keeping the enemy's planes from hitting our
troops.

84

We trained a huge cadre of officers and men in the tough-
est kind of war there is: mountain warfare, trench warfare,
mortar and artillery duels, cover and concealment, hand-to-
hand combat, grenade throwing, "garlic" patrolling, bayonet
tactics. Most of these men are still in the reserves, and though
the attrition on our men and officers was high at times, the
ones who lived through it are experienced, toughened, battle-
wise warriors. We could never, with the most realistic ma-
neuvers in the book, have accomplished the training job for
possible future wars which the Korean war gave us.

We gave our Navy its first real taste of carrier-jet warfare.
The Navy, fighting its battles out at sea, got very little pub-
licity in this war compared to the Sabre pilots, the soldiers,
and the Marines, who were stationed in Korea where the re-
porters who produce the stories could easily get to them. But
the Navy carried a heavy load. Steaming up and down the
coasts, it shelled coastal railroads and gun emplacements,
sometimes fired its big guns in artillery support of troops so
far inland the sailors on the ships never heard the shells ex-
plode as they hit. Navy jets and dive bombers were responsi-
ble for the bridges, railroads, and enemy supply dumps along
the east coast.

I once stood on the bridge of an aircraft carrier attached
to Task Force 77 and watched Admiral John Perry as he
made a ticklish decision. The seas were rough, but there was
an important mission for his planes, and Admiral Perry
wanted, like any good commander, to get in his licks. But he
had millions of dollars* worth of precious jet planes aboard.
He could let them take off and complete their mission in
Korea. But with the sea pitching as it was, and the carrier
deck rolling and tossing with each wave, he was not sure that
he could recover them again and bring them safely aboard.
He wanted more than anything to do his bit that day against

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 85

the enemy. But the admiral also had to think about his invest-
ment in planes and pilots. On the carrier, which was his flag-
ship, he also had millions of dollars* worth of weather gear,
radar equipment, and some highly trained weather officers to
tell him how the sea would probably be behaving at any
given hour. But he could not trust even these modern gadgets
and experienced specialists to tell him whether he ought to
let his planes take off. Instead, Admiral Perry relied simply
on his sea legs. He was an old salt of fifty-four. Besides know-
ing the modern and intricate art of jet warfare, he was also a
master of the most ancient of all naval subjects, the sea.
There on the bridge, as I watched him, he simply spread his
legs a little and planted his feet firmly. Then for about five
minutes he felt the rolling deck under him and watched the
waves tossing up spray on the window of his lookout. Twice
he gave orders for a small shift in direction. Each time, as the
ship swerved a little into the wind from its original course, he
took a short step on the deck and planted his feet again.
Finally it was the salt in Admiral Perry's veins and the sensi-
tive nerves in his sea legs that told him what to do. He turned
to his chief of staff and growled a quiet order: *7/aunch jets."

It was a well-fought war, in the air, on the sea, and on the
land.

Every unit in Korea had its hero. Sometimes he was a hefl-
f or-leather fighting man who thrived on action and danger.
More often he was a sober lad who stayed quietly in the
background and performed his feat of daring only when the
fortunes of war suddenly thrust upon him new responsibili-
ties. Pfc. Albert Lang, a blond, soft-eyed Marine of twenty-
three from North Hollywood, was such a hero. When I met
him he had been a Marine for only thirteen months, and he
had been in Korea for seven. He had a fiancee back home and
his ambition, he told me with some embarrassment, for fear

86

I would laugh, I guess, was to become an interior decorator.
Ever since he was a boy Lang had wanted to learn how to
run a radio. Finally, when he got to Korea, he pestered a
sergeant into showing him how. It was this small whim that
later saved his life, and the lives of about fifty other men.

Early in the month of October 1952, Lang found himself
on top of a Marine outpost, a strongpoint stuck out beyond
the Marine front lines as a listening post, and a buffer to take
the brunt of any Chinese attack. The outpost was nicknamed
"Frisco" every outpost had a radio code name and the
Marines on Frisco liked to joke that theirs was so named be-
cause of all the night life up there.

One night, without warning, the Chinese suddenly hit
Frisco with everything they had and the place was livelier
than usual. It was the night when Lang, whether he looked
the type or not, was destined to become a hero.

"Everything was okay," he told me a day or so later, "until
they started dropping incoming on us. It was terrific stuff-
mortars and artillery. We suffered quite a few casualties and
finally we had to call for relief. Another platoon came out
from the front lines to take over. We had only a third of the
men we had started out with. Everyone else was either dead
or wounded or his nerves were aU gone. Just as the relief
platoon got to us the goonies overran our position.

"They came in right under their own barrage. They must
have killed forty or fifty of their own people coming in that
way, under their own artillery. I was in the command post
bunker with the lieutenant. Our platoon sergeant was in
there too, and a few casualties. We were getting set to take
off in a few minutes, as soon as our relief got squared away.
But just then our gunnie [gunnery sergeant] came in and
said the goonies were already in our trenches outside the
bunker. Hie lieutenant said that was impossible and he went

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 87

outside to look. He got hit by grenades. They were out there
all right.

"Somebody remembered we didn't have any weapons with
us. They were all busted by the incoming mortars or clogged
up with dust. The gunnie said we'd fight them with our fists.
He walked out with a couple of other guys and they got it
from burp guns and grenades. We pulled them back in with
us. We were getting pretty crowded then, because the
bunker was only built for five and we had about fifteen men
in it.

"I got on the radio and told the boys back at the front line
to send in artillery right on our position. I asked for VT
(which would explode right over the enemy) and also for a
TBox me in* [an artillery pattern laid down all around the
bunker to drive away the enemy who surrounded it]. There
were about two or three hundred goonies running around
outside, laughing and screaming. I guess they must have had
some dope. When our artillery came in, they quit yelling and
you could only hear some of them moaning. Then everything
was quiet and we figured they had left.

"But pretty soon we heard them digging. There were still
c many many* of them [Oriental patois]. After they finished
digging we heard them running down our trenches, tossing
grenades into all our bunkers to make sure our guys were
dead. Finally they came to our bunker. We could hear them
going through the supplies we had stacked outside. One of
them came to the door and looked in. All we had left was one
carbine, but it didn't even have a bolt.

"The goonie lit a cigarette lighter I guess he got it from
some dead Marine and our hearts just about dropped to the
deck. He looked at Pf c. Smith with his carbine, and Smith
looked at this goonie, and they were both snowed. They
couldn't do a thing. The goonie went away and came back

88

with some more. They had burp guns and grenades. We had
put up a barricade of sandbags just inside the door and that
was afl that saved us. They tossed their grenades and sprayed
us with burp guns, but everything hit the sandbags and none
of us was hurt. Then they brought up a couple of M-Is and
opened up. Those bullets went right through the sandbags
and we could hear them going over our heads.

Then they brought up a satchel charge [dynamite] and
set it down inside our entrance. It went off with a terrific ex-
plosion and knocked down our sandbags and shook us all up.
But it didn't hurt anyone. I radioed to the boys in the rear
again and told them to open up on us with their machine
guns. They did, and that stopped the goonies for a while. But
one of them was real crazy. He got on top of our bunker and
started to dig a machine gun right into our outside wall. He
pulled the sandbags off our roof to wall himself in, and every
time he pulled one away he poked his machine gun through
the hole and gave us a few rounds. He was laughing like hell.
Tm sure he was doped up. I was going Able-Sugar [code for
a GI expression denoting excitement] on the radio by that
time and told our buddies back on the line to keep those
machine guns going, not even to stop to reload. 9 *

Back in his command post on the front lines, Lieutenant
Colonel Russell, who was Lang's battalion commander,
listened to the radio messages and faced a difficult decision.
He knew that if he sent reinforcements out to rescue his be-
leaguered men on Frisco they might get killed before they
even reached it It was his only chance, however, and he
scraped together a group of volunteers and sent them for-
ward. They came under heavy enemy fire all the way out,
and by the time they got to Frisco they had only one officer
and five men left Russell scraped together another rescue
party. But they came under heavy fire as soon as they started

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 89

through the valley, and Russell called them back. He had just
decided he had done all he could and would have to let
Frisco fall when Lang came in on the radio again. It was his
first message in nearly an hour.

"Give us some more VT," Lang pleaded, "or well all be
dead by morning."

Morning was only an hour away. But Lang's message was
so moving that Russell decided he must make one more try.
He sent out another rescue party and called for mortar fire
on top of Lang's position. This forced the Chinese to take
cover and keep their heads down (the dope was apparently
wearing off by now and the Chinese were using their heads ) .

**We thought we were gone for sure by this time," Lang
remembered later. The wounded in our bunker were calling
for water, but we had no water. Someone had sent out a case
of beer, so we all lit up what we figured was our last cigarette
and drank what we figured was our last can of been We just
couldn't see the goonies Trilling us and drinking our beer too.
I kept calling for fire missions, and this kept the goonies mov-
ing. [Russell later estimated Lang's coolness and skill re-
sulted in killing over two hundred of the Chinese.] Finally
Smitty yelled out, Here comes Mr. Moody. His .45 is really
smoking!' I looked out and sure enough there was Mr.
Moody charging up the hill with the relief platoon, waving
and shooting his revolver. He looked just like John Wayne.
When he looked in on us I said, 1 could kiss you.* He just
blushed and told us to get set to go bade

**The goonies were running down the hill themselves by
this time, but when Mr. Moody took us down our side of the
hill they sniped at us with 76s [cannon] and machine guns
all the way. Everybody made it back, though. We carried our
wounded. The only ones we left behind were our dead. They
were buried in the bunkers under all the dirt. We didn't rec-

90

ognize the hill when we came off. When we went out it had
looked kind of pretty, with lots of foliage. But when we came
back the incoming had churned it up so much it was only a
sandpile.

It was Colonel Russell who saved our lives. If it hadn't
been for him we'd all be dead. He's hot to trot"

It was a well-fought war.

It was also a superbly organized war.

We made tremendous strides in military medicine and in
the care and evacuation of wounded troops. MASH units
(Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals) were scattered across the
front, so dose to the actual fighting that the artillery pieces
were sometimes behind them and the tents often shook as the
guns sent over their deadly shells. And yet despite their tent
existence these units were so well equipped, and staffed with
such fine specialists, that a man could be provided with
eveiything from an appendectomy or an amputation of a
finger to a sensitive brain operation all within an hour from
the time he was injured. Each MASH had a helicopter strip
attached to it, and the helicopter pilots, a dedicated group of
daring men, would fly their choppers right through a mortar
barrage at the front, land next to an aid tent, strap the
wounded man into a basket on the outside of the chopper,
make him snug with blankets, and then fly hi back to the
MASH, where he could be taken direct from the helicopter
to the operating table. No one knows how many lives we
saved which would have been lost had the men been forced
to make a long, bumpy ride over rocky roads in a jeep am-
bulance.

In addition to these local advantages, the war also had its
effect at home. It caused us to get our defense machinery

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 91

going. We woke up to the physical danger of Communism.
And the very fact that the Korean war was more frustrating
than decisive has forced us to realize that we must stay
awake, that we cannot win this sort of battle in a hurry and
go back to having fun again.

We got our first taste of a new kind of war, a pattern we
will undoubtedly see more of before we can relax, a war
which is only part of a war, a battle which cannot be de-
cisively won simply because the real enemy we are fighting is
not even in our gun sights. The French are engaged in the
same kind of conflict in Indo-China, on another precarious
peninsula. They too are fighting a native attack which is in-
spired and encouraged and was probably triggered by Mos-
cow. And even if they can win a real victory there which
seems unlikely, for reasons similar to those that prevented our
winning a real victory in Korea-the true culprit, whose
leaders reside in Moscow and whose own troops are not yet
committed, will not be defeated. He will use the same trick
again, somewhere else. He may try to pull our world apart at
the seams by getting us involved in as many limited little
wars as he can, in as many different directions. Our response
should be to counterattack where toe have to, but to keep
each battle in perspective, to let no one battle get us so
deeply enmeshed on untenable terrain and against over-
whelming odds that the conflict serves the enemy's purpose
more than it does ours.

It can be said that we defeated the enemy. It was Russia's
Malik, not we, who first proposed the trace talks. It was the
enemy, not tie U.N., who was hurting in May 1951. And it
was the enemy who was so eager for a truce in June 1953 that
when Syngman Khee turned loose 27,000 of the men the
enemy wanted back, the enemy's spokesmen could only

92

sputter and then shut up. The enemy had miscalculated his
own chances, and he was ready to quit long before he did. He
would, in fact, have signed the truce earlier if it had not been
for the matter of prisoners. The enemy insisted on having all
his prisoners back. He could not afford the loss of face in Asia
which he suffered when 35,000 prisoners let it be known they
did not want to go home to Communism and to the glorious
Red democracy. We had taken these prisoners in good faith.
We dropped leaflets on them and sent broadcasts across the
line by loudspeaker, telling them that if they but quit the war
and surrendered to us we would take care of them. It was a
smart thing to do on our part, for it is far cheaper and more
efficient to knock off the enemy's troops, one by one, with
words, which are free, than with shells, which are costly. But
once we had these men we were committed to keep our
word. They did not want to go back to the horrors of Com-
munism, and we, who had wooed them away from those hor-
rors, could not, without forfeiting our reputation for human-
ity, force flxein to.

It was Syngman Bhee who tried to force the issue. Rhee is
a remarkable man. He has fought for his native land since the
days of his youth which is some fifty years. The Japanese
tortured htm for trying to organize a movement in opposition
to their long and ruthless occupation. For most of his life he
roamed the world, settling down in one capital after another,
trying to arouse interest in the plight of his people. No one
listened to him, and, as often happens to dedicated people
who are given no outlet for their emotions and no satisfaction
for their zeal, he became a fanatic on his favorite subject,
Korean independence.

Rhee is not a democrat His country is not the kind of land
that can be organized and governed, at least for the present,
along democratic lines. It has too much to learn. It must first

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 93

become more sophisticated, more experienced in self-suffi-
ciency, more aware of the basic ideas of human dignity
which have been beaten out of the Koreans and stifled during
the long years of oppression and rule from the outside. It is a
backward and primitive country. Bhee, who feels it is his
manifest destiny to unite Korea his ideals go no further than
that has kept himself in power through the ruthless and
efficient use of his police. He wants to be alive and ruling
when unification conies, so that he can have the personal sat-
isfaction, at long last, of seeing his dream come true. This is
both an understandable and a tragic ideal It is understand-
able because he is the leading figure in Korea ( to preserve his
power, he has seen to that: no other leader can become too
popular or strong without finding himself, before long, out of
a job). Rhee controls eveiything: press, education, the army,
and even the elections at which his name comes up, along
with a few others, for the honor and gloiy and awesome
responsibilities of holding Korea together as a political en-
tity. He has opposition within Korea. A number of men for
various motives feel the old man has done his job and should
step aside. But Rhee is the only name even vaguely familiar
to most of the fanners in the remote villages. And when the
opposition becomes too hot he knows how to handle it. Once,
in the midst of the war, Rhee's term as President had run out
And he was blocked by the new Korean constitution, which
limited the number of terms the country's President could
serve. Rhee was determined, however, to continue in office,
so he would be top man if and when victory finally came. To
make this possible, he started a parliamentary move to amend
the constitution, and when a number of Korean legislators
had the effrontery to oppose him on the grounds the consti-
tution must be preserved Rhee tossed them into jail to think
things over.

94

He also had some second thoughts about his Vice-Presi-
dent. A hardheaded political operator named Lee Bum Siik
was leading contender for the job. He had served, among
other things, as boss of Rhee's police, and he tried to cement
this advantage in power by busily seeing to it that the people
of South Korea learned of his ambition and heard his name.
Rhee, supposedly, had given him the nod. With energy
worthy of a Tammany man running for mayor, Lee had huge
posters printed with his name and picture emblazoned across
the paper. Then he had his henchmen paste these right next
to a Rhee picture wherever they found one, so that the
people would be sure to note that it was Rhee and Lee for the
country. But at the very last moment Rhee decided Lee was
becoming too powerful and getting a little too close to him.
Biding his time until it was too late for Lee to counterattack,
Rhee had his police whom Lee had once administered him-
selfhie themselves to every block in Seoul and Pusan and to
every little valley village. There they spread the word that
Lee was not the old man's choice after all. And they whis-
pered, instead, the name of an obscure politician the people
had never heard of. When the ballots were counted, Lee had
lost. And Rhee, once more, was undisputed boss of Korea.

It is undoubtedly heady stuff, being an undisputed boss, if
only of a backward, war-ravaged, and hapless little place like
Korea. The ultimate conclusion, however, of such an arrange-
ment is that the boss soon begins to feel he is at the center of
some great but imaginative stage where he can behave ex-
actly as he wishes. There are plenty of examples in history-
living and dead of strongmen who have felt and behaved in
the same manner: Per6n, Tito, and Boss Hague, to name but
three varied examples.

The tragedy of Rhee is that he soon came to feel he stood
Dot only at the center of the stage in Korea but at the center

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 95

of the universe as well. And why not? The only hot war in the
world at the moment was taking place in Korea. It was a war
between the great, opposing powers of the world, and the
basic concept of freedom versus slavery was at stake. Sixteen
different nations, from all over the world, had sent their
troops to fight and die for Korea. The great US. had sent its
best generals, its hottest pilots, a million men even its new
President to look after Korea. He and his country were the
focal point of the world. The war against Communism was
being waged in his land.

And once in the winter of 1950 we had liberated and
united his country for him. For a few brief days before the
Chinese entered we had erased the 38th Parallel as an artifi-
cial boundary and had made Ehee's lifelong dream come
true. Surely, he thought, if we had done it once, we would do
it again. Surely, while we had all this steam up and all these
soldiers on the ground, we would preserve and unify Korea.
Surely we would not hurt him to appease the Communists.
Did we not know how dangerous and treacherous the Com-
munists were? Did we not know we could not trust them?
Did we not realize we would someday have to figjht the Com-
munists to the end? Why did we not do it now, in Korea,
where we had them in flight and had almost licked them once
before? On and on, in an almost hysterical outburst of emo-
tional frustration, Rhee criticized die only friends and allies
he had in the world.

The tragic truth, of course,, is that Bhee, insofar as his own
country is concerned, was right There is no rhyme or reason
to the artificial boundary across Korea. It was drawn arbitrar-
ily after World War II as an expedient for dividing up the
task of taking Japanese prisoners. Neighboring Russia cleared
the northern half and we cleared the southern. We were
thinking more slowly in those rosier days and the meai who

96

drew the line did not foresee that it would become frozen,
with Russia immediately organizing her side into a satellite
and with the Western powers forced to follow suit in the
south.

Divided, Korea is a hopeless anachronism. Its industrial
center and its best industrial brains are located in North
Korea. (Scholars who know the country well say that the
North Koreans, for this reason, are in general the sharpest
and most adaptable of all Koreans which helps explain why
they were such stalwart, resourceful fighters. ) The rice bowl,
on the other hand, which all of Korea is used to drawing on
for food, is in South Korea. Neither side can exist or have a
balanced economy without the other unless both sides are
given immense quantities of aid from outside sources.

AH of this is true. And it is tragic. But it is no more tragic,
when one looks around the rest of the world, than the parti-
tion of Austria, of Germany, or of Trieste. We would never
go to war, and use up our men and our pilots and our capital,,
merely to twite, say, Austria. That goal, in itself, would not
be worth the cost. Our people would not back such a venture.
We might be involved someday in an all-out war against
Communism, in which we are able to concentrate so much
power and treasure in the final event that we defeat the Com-
munist enemy decisively and thus, as a result of a war fought
for a larger purpose, also succeed in driving the enemy from
Austria, abolishing the zones, and reuniting the country. And
if the enemy were to attempt to unify Austria for his own
purposes, we would probably fight. But that kind of unifying
maneuver would never be a cardinal aim of our military
policy. It would not be the excuse, in itself, for the war.

Ihe unification of Korea will similarly have to wait. And
Bhee will have to wait. The unification of Korea was not, in
Itself, justification for continuing the war. The only justifica-

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 97

tion for continuing that war would have been to extend our
training maneuver a little longer, to keep the pressure on the
enemy and prolong the attrition on his forces (and on ours),
to keep the enemy's forces pinned down in Korea so that they
could not be pulled out to go elsewhere ( likewise, ourselves } ,
or to add to our growing cadre of trained and battle-wise
soldiers, sailors, and pilots.

We might have done all that But the seams were begin-
ning to loosen. The U.S. public was growing restive at the
sight of the daily casualty figures. U.S. mothers were begin-
ing to argue that their sons were in Korea for no good pur-
pose. The war itself had reached the stage where it was cost-
ing us more, in some respects, than the damage we were able
to inflict on the enemy. It was wise to stop.

But the wall is there. We answered aggression, stopped it,
punished it, and threw it back. If we paid heavily for the
battle, so did the enemy in trucks, in guns, and in the con-
sumer items which, apparently, the enemy population would
like to have too. The ending of the war in Korea does not
mean at all that we have appeased the enemy. We are still
there. Our pilots are on the ready-lines. Our men are in their
bunkers. There is ammunition for all. We will not attack the
enemy, but if he attacks us we are ready, *hig time. We have
merely rung the befl on the preliminary round. We need only
remain alert for the beH signaling the next round. We have, in
a war neither side could either win or lose, found a necessary
substitute for victory.

vn

THE WAR along the front lines was a weird one. But it was
weirder still at Kaesong, and later, when a number of embar-
rassing military incidents caused the armistice talks to be
shifted there, in the dusty little village of Panmunjom. There,
too, the war raged on. Only in this case the protagonists were
an unarmed group of delegates and several platoons of cor-
respondents, whose only weapons were their pens, their
flashbulbs, and their unflagging curiosity.

Correspondents drove to both sites in convoys of jeeps and
trucks. We always stuffed our pockets with candy bars when

100

we left, and tossed them into the road, as we bumped along,
to the crowds of smiling Korean kids who came down out of
the villages to watch us pass. At Kaesong, where the talks
began, we were photographed from the front and from both
sides by Chinese photographers, who crept up on us slyly
with their Russian-made cameras and snapped away for
identification pictures which were presumably sent on to
Peiping and Moscow to be pasted on whatever dossiers the
Reds have compiled on Western reporters. At Panmunjom we
stood in the middle of the dusty road, stomping our feet to
keep warm in the intense cold, and watching the artillery
shells from both sides land on the front lines two miles or
so away*

When the talks started the correspondents had the addi-
tional unsettling experience of becoming participants in the
drama they were supposed to be reporting.

General Ridgway had suggested the truce talks be held
on a neutral hospital ship, anchored offshore where there
would be no danger of military incidents and where there
would, by happy coincidence, be room only for the official
participants. The enemy objected. He said he would not play
unless we came to Kaesong. The U.N. was anxious to get
going, so Ridgway acceded* But from the first day the Reds
made hay. They stipulated that U.N. convoys enter Kaesong
with white flags on the bumpers of their vehicles so the
enemy troops would not fire on them by mistake. This we
did, only to discover that the enemy photographers were
gleefully distributing pictures to the Red press showing our
side coming to the talks under the flag of defeat We quickly
canceled that propaganda bonanza by ripping off the flags.
Then we discovered that the enemy was using the truce talks
as a pretense for moving aimed troops into the area osten-
sibly to guard the site against unruly enemy civilians. We
protested that violation of good faith also.

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 101

In the meantime the ILN. press corps was furiously putting
pressure on Ridgway to get reporters and photographers into
Kaesong to report the story. Why, U.N. reporters asked,
should the Reds be allowed to have their press there and we
not? Why should the enemy be allowed to make aU the
propaganda he wanted to while we sat back and failed to let
our own free press even answer it?

The pressure became so great that General Ridgway was
forced to take time out from his busy preparations at Munsan
and drive to Seoul in the rain to try to placate the two hun-
dred angry correspondents gathered there. He strode into
the briefing room at the Seoul press billets with his famous
grenade and first-aid kit still dangling from his harness.

"What's the first-aid kit f or?" a new reporter asked one of
his colleagues.

"In case the grenade goes off," said the tired old-timer.

Ridgway turned on all his charm and tried to explain to
the press that it was not time yet for them to make their
entrance. He had enough trouble "getting the talks on the
tracks," he said, without taking a chance on upsetting the
delicate arangements by bringing in a new and, for the Reds,
an Tmfa-milfar element. Then he drove back to Munsan after
promising us a press train for working quarters and some
briefing. The angry press was not mollified. It's another
Yalta," growled one big-league newsman who had just arrived
from the U.S. to get in on the story . They just don't want us
to see what's going on there."

A day or so later, however, Ridgway changed his mind.
The Reds were becoming so obstreperously arrogant at Kae-
song that he needed a gimmick to give them a scare. He
ordered a truck loaded with correspondents and added ft to
the usual convoy of Army stenographers and aides who drove
over daily from Munsan to attend to the delegates (who flew

102

in by helicopter). The Reds, who were already losing face
because they had no helicopters, stopped the convoy and
protested that reporters were not yet allowed in Kaesong.
The convoy officer said he had orders from Ridgway himself
to bring in the reporters and that if the Reds did not allow
them in the entire convoy would turn back and the talks
would be off. The guard stood fast, the convoy returned to
Munsan, and the fat was in the fire. A number of young
reporters wondered if they ever dared show their faces up
front again, once the GIs learned that the talks which could
end the war were off, all because a few correspondents in-
sisted on riding into Kaesong to see the sights.

When they saw that Ridgway meant business, however,
the Reds relented and the free press joined the circus.

It was a minor victory for the press. We could not enter
the meetings, of course, and there was little we could do but
send back reports on what Kaesong looked like, whether Nam
II and Admiral Joy frowned or smiled when they adjourned
for the day, and what Alan Winnington had to say.

Winnington was the foppish, rather effeminate correspond-
ent for the London Daily Worker who came down each day
with the Reds, and was thought, by some of our observers, to
be a leading adviser to the Chinese on psychological warfare
and propaganda. He was an articulate, insufferably stuffy
sort, and although lie occasionally did come across with an
inside tip on what was going on in the meetings (he was
briefed by the Reds, whereas the free press was often left
in die cold by our own delegates), lie was thoroughly hated
by us aE

For a time, when the talks dragged on for hours inside
and Winnington had run out of dialectic, we played a game
with him. He was constantly surrounded by furtive-looking
Chines^ who we assumed from the start were agents who

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 103

knew English and were assigned to keep a shrewd eye on
Wilmington. It was Fred Sparks, the witty correspondent
for the Chicago Daily News, who cooked up the game: each
day, when the usual badinage about U.N. violations and Red
stupidity had been traded back and forth, Fred would get
Wilmington aside and in a loud stage whisper congratulate
him for some piece of military information he had slipped
to us the day before. ""We know you're really a British agent,
Alan,*' Sparks would whisper, *and we want you to know we
think you're doing a jolly fine job. Keep it up."

Wilmington would turn pale, look around to see if any of
his Chinese henchmen were listening they always were
and do his best to laugh the matter off. The only drawback
to the fun came when we occasionally wondered, among our-
selves, if Winnington really were an agent and we were ruin-
ing his masquerade. We decided he lacked the brains for
such an assignment, however, and the game went on as long
as Fred Sparks was around to spark it

There was little kughter in the meetings. All we could hear
from the outside was the steady droning of interpreters, read-
ing each speech in English, Korean, and Chinese, and then
back again. Once, for more than two hours, we could detect
no sound at all. And kter we learned this was because no one
had said anything.

It was the day of the twenty-first session at Kaesong, and
the item on the agenda concerned whether the truce line
would be drawn back at the 88th Parallel no matter where
the war ended (the Communist demand) or would rest on
whatever line both sides happened to occupy when the fight-
ing actually ceased (since we were already north of the paral-
lel, this was our position). Nam H, a schoolteacher turned
diplomat^ opened the session with a brief but academic
question: **Wfll you accept our fair and just proposal?**

104

Admiral Joy replied that Nam's proposal was neither fair
nor just. Then he gave Nam a severe tongue-lashing for trying
to inject into a military armistice some purely political points.
"By your inflexibility you have slammed the door on every
attempt to make progress. . . . You did not come here to
stop the fighting. You did not come here to negotiate an
armistice. You came here to state your price, your political
price for which you are willing to sell the people of Korea
temporary respite from pain. You have engaged in these
conferences only to present demands and not to negotiate
solutions. . . . You have insisted on discussing the political
division of Korea at the cost of the people of Korea. They are
the victims of your refusal to discuss a military solution to a
military problem. When you are ready to discuss purely mili-
tary matters (such as the demilitarized zone, which was the
item on the agenda) I am confident that equitable arrange-
ments can be worked out"

It was tough talk and schoolteacher Nam was at a loss for
words. He obviously needed to stall for time in order to con-
sult his principal back in Pyongyang. While Admiral Joy
waited for Nam ITs reply, Nam shuffled a stack of papers in
front of htm and leaned over to chat with the Chinese dele-
gateswho, many observers felt, were really miming the
show, with Nam as a Korean front. But he said nothing. For
two hows and fourteen minutes not a word was said in the
Kaesong meeting hall that day. Joy waited patiently. Nam
stole fleeting peeks at his watch and doodled a series of red
stars on his note pad (with a red pencil). But he did not
budge.

Finally, his weathered face still calm and composed,
Admiral Joy broke the long silence. "It appears we are dead-
locked on point two. Can you offer a solution as to how this
deadlock can be broken?"

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 105

Nam leaned over for another quick chat with his Chinese
colleagues, then he replied: "The solution to the deadlock is
to establish a military demarcation line at the 38th Parallel."

The meeting hroke up and the delegates rose to go home.
Once outside the hall, a U.S. Army stenographer collapsed on
the grass, waiting for his jeep. "I don't know why, but I
always want to come back tomorrow," he said. "It's like going
to a Wild West serial."

"Yeah," said a lieutenant, "but the trouble is they always
show the same reeL"

A day or two later, however, Nam suddenly weakened.
His aides trundled into the room a large-scale map on which
they had drawn a proposed demarcation line and a demili-
tarized zone. It was not drawn along the 38th Parallel, but
along the front line itself. Admiral Joy had squeezed a con-
cession.

On and on the talks went. They may have seemed ridicu-
lous at times to the folks back home, but they were as much
a part of the war as was the artillery duel going on day after
day within earshot of Panmunjom itself. The enemy was sly,
and he was well armed. We were straightforward and dogged
but, as in the war itself, we were not always well matched.

In the winter of 1951 the subject of nominating neutral
observers to staff a future Korean armistice commission came
up on the agenda. (The agenda itself had taken three weeks
to draw up. ) We were not yet ready to tackle the subject of
neutral observers, for we knew full well that the enemy had
a number of satellite nations on his side which were "neutral"
insofar as the Korean fighting itself was concerned, but
certainly not neutral insofar as their attitude toward Com-
munism versus freedom was concerned. One of the U.N. dele-
gates at the moment ( they were constantly shifted as we tried

106

to find military men who could bargain) was Major General
Howard Turner, a big, burly, Air Force general better known
for his imposing stature and loud voice than for any quick
finesse in the clinches. He had been passing through Tokyo
and was pressed into service by General Ridgway for a trial
period as a top negotiator.

"Are you ready to select neutral observers?'' the Com-
munists taunted.

"It is under active consideration," was General Turner's
consistent rejoinder.

Then, for five successive days, we tried to get the enemy
delegation to agree to setting up a subcommittee imme-
diately to work on item four of the agenda (relating to pris-
oners of war, a pressing issue) . On each of the five days we
asked the Reds to come to the table with an idea or two
which could at least be bandied about.

Each time North Korean General Lee Sang Jo looked
straight ahead and replied, throwing the U.N. phrase back
at us: "It is under active consideration."

Just as he had on the battlefield and in the prisoner com-
pounds on Koje-do, the enemy resorted to numerous tricks.
Many of the delays were caused by the necessity for both
sides to examine every gift horse the other side proposed
from mouth to tail and back again.

In November 1951 the Communists finally came around
to the U.N. position that the armistice line should be drawn
wherever the war halted, and that both sides would then
draw back two kilometers from that line to provide a four-
kilometer buffer zone. (While the talks continued, both sides
proceeded to take as many hills as they could two kilometers
in front of where they really wanted to wind up. Thus, when
they had to draw back, they would be sitting pretty, with
good trenches and good observation on the enemy. This

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 107

maneuvering accounted for many of the bigger battles which
raged on to the end of the fighting. )

Finally the Reds proposed that we determine the line of
contact of both armies in some areas, a no man's land made
it a lengthy problem of debateand that this line be con-
sidered the center of a mutual two-kilometer withdrawal
This sounded fine to us. It was what v>e had been asking for
all along. Nevertheless, the TLN. delegation was waiy of
accepting the proposal. It was so good, we reasoned, that
something must be wrong with it And so, for three days, we
killed time at Panmunjon while our delegates did their home-
work and tore the Red proposal apart back at Munsan. "Our
men have read the thing backward and forward and standing
on their heads," said an aide. They still hadn't found any
enemy booby traps, but they were still convinced the enemy
was not playing fair. Why would he suddenly give in? "He
proposal is too ambiguous, 3 * a U.N. spokesman told the
enemy, not really sure as he said this why it was ambiguous.

Then our delegates read the fine print again and discovered
that the enemy had, indeed, laid a trap. He intended his pro-
posal to go into effect immediately, and if we had accepted ft
he would have tried to hold us to an immediate withdrawal
of two kilometers from our front line. We would then have
been faced with a de facto cease-fire, which meant the fight-
ing would stop and the enemy would have a chance to rest
and recoup his losses while the talks continued. We gave the
horse back and said no, thanks.

**What are the negotiations like inside the teat?" a reporter
once asked Rear Admiral Arleigh ("Si-knot") Burke, of Japa-
nese war fame and a leading delegate for several months.

"The Reds laugh when they are embarrassed,** Burke said.
TBut there is no personal warmth between the teams. These

108

guys are died-in-the-wool Communists, and they are cold as
helL They want to kill as many of us as possible, and that is
the goal You don't persuade them by logic, fairness, or the
equity of a thing. You persuade them purely through power."

In the fall of 1951 we tried just that. Along the western
front General Van Fleet unleashed a limited offensive to show
the enemy we still meant business. Throughout the truce
talks Van Fleet had kept his army warmed up for business.
He toured the front constantly, pointing out inadequate posi-
tions and personally changing the fields of fire his guns were
arranged to cover.

~We would consider it a great opportunity if they were to
attack," Van Fleet said. "I don't doubt that our men have
been getting letters from home urging them to be careful.
Nobody wants to be the last casualty in a war. But if the
enemy starts fighting again he will find an eager army waiting
for him*"

Tin sure going to feel cheated if I get killed at this stage,"
said a young platoon leader as he flew back to Korea from a
brief five days of rest and recuperation leave in Tokyo. He
had heard about the limited offensive.

Throughout the talks the press did its best to keep track of
the twislings and turnings, the innuendo and the dialectic.
In so doing they sometimes got into the hair of the delegates.
It was a ticklish job, at best, trying to negotiate with the Reds
without having to perform the feat in a goldfish bowl where
all the world including the Reds could study each move,
false or sure.

Tie press was only trying to help, however, and most
corespondents felt that, since the war was all about freedom,
the free world should know what was going on. The generals

did not always agree, and at times they did their best to sneak
one over on the watching press.

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 109

During the night of November 27 a special set of instruc-
tions went down to front-line units. Platoon leaders who got
the word from their company commanders, who got it from
their battalions, which presumably had in turn been briefed
by regiment, which got it from division plodded through the
crunchy snow from one frozen hole to another to inform their
men on the front line that until further notice they were to
fire at the enemy only in self -defense, and that patrols would
go out only to collect information, and not to pick a fight It
was a unique twist in warfare and it was to have some unique
consequences.

Soon after dawn on the f oflowing morning a young British
infantry lieutenant name Ian Powis picked eleven men from
his platoon and started out on a routine patrol into enemy
territory. He had the new instructions. For several days there
had been a kind of gentleman's agreement between Powis*
unit and the Chinese facing it on die next hill, which lay in
a kind of no man's land along the demarcation line. Ite
British patrolled and controlled the hfll during the day; and
at night, when the British returned to their lines, the hill was
taken over by the enemy. As a further sign of increasingly
peaceful intentions on both sides (no man on either side
wanted to be the last to die), both friend and foe shared one
of the bunkers which stood on the Ml. The British would
warm themselves in it during their daily inspection trips. And
when they got there they usually f ound a small fire, left
burning by the enemy to keep the bunker warm for them.
This was not very warlike, and it was by no means the rule
across the front, but while the talks dragged on at Panmun-
jom arrangements similar to this one were not unusual

When Powis and his men readied the hill that morning to
look for signs of enemy activity, the lieutenant went first to
the bunker to warm himself . But as he opened the door two

110

very surprised Chinese soldiers stuck their heads out. For a
second Powis and the Chinese merely stared. Then the young
lieutenant, who had been well schooled in England and had
learned the art of saying just the proper thing at the proper
moment, uttered a crisp apology: "So sorry. I'm just the
postman." This was in reference to a whimsical habit the
Chinese had of erecting "peace mailboxes'* between the lines
and stuffing them with notes, in English, suggesting that U.N.
troops quit fighting and go home. Pretending confusion at
finding no mail, Powis backed down the hill. The Chinese,
who made no move to lift their burp guns, merely stared
after him.

Powis led his men safely out of range, and then he sat
down to radio his battalion for further instructions. Obvi-
ously, he said, he was not supposed to shoot the poor devils
not after the instructions he had heard the previous night.
But the Chinese had shown no intention of leaving the hill.
And it was supposed to be our area during the day. What, he
asked, was he supposed to do now?

It was a good question and battalion passed it along to
regiment, which referred it back to brigade, which sent it on
to division, where it was bounced on up the kdder again to
General Van Fleet's headquarters. The officers there knew
that the map makers were still in Panmunjom drawing up
the final demarcation line, so they passed the problem on to
them. (It was a superb example of the old army game.)

Whose hill was this, Eighth Army asked, that Lieutenant
Powis had gotten himself onto, only to find the Chinese al-
ready squatting there? The map makers consulted their
drawings and sent back a ruling : the final line was drawn just
on the U.N. side of the disputed MO. The Chinese, therefore
-as they must have known-had a perfect right to be there.
P&wis was recalled to his own positions.

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY HI

No one, least of all the professional soldiers, professed to
know what kind of war this was. General Van fleet indicated
he was having trouble understanding the order himself.
Everyone who knew Van Fleet and his methods of fighting
had do doubt at all that the instructions to take it easy on the
enemy had not come from him and that he was only stuck
with the task of trying to explain them. Powis* own British
superior officer was especially perturbed. ""Good Lord/* he
said, "we might have to take those blighters on again; and
that might create an international incident. Can't have that,
you know."

Here is what had happened. In an effort to find a gimmick
which would cut through the endless bickering at Panmun-
jom, test the Communists' sincere desire for a real peace,
and put a halt in the meantime to the daily bloodshed, a com-
mander somewhere along the line had decided to try simmer-
ing the war down to a slow boil We would sit on the ac-
cepted line. We would repel aggression but not attack. We
would fire only when fired upon. We would, in effect, offer a
clear and unmistakable demonstration of OUT good intentions.
If the enemy followed suit, then we knew he really wanted a
truce. If he did not, the maneuver would show us where he
stood. We would at least put the burden of proof on him and
we would save some U.N. lives. Meanwhile we would remain
alert.

The only trouble was that the U.N. commanders forgot to
tip the reporters off. They assumed, for some reason, that the
reporters were all snugly back in Seoul, drinking brandy and
trying to keep warm. Many of them, in fact, were roaming
the frozen front looking for stories for the home folks. It was
a sad mistake on the Army's part. If it had wanted to keep
the trick a secret, it could have called in the reporters, briefed
them, and sworn them to secrecy. No one would Bave spoiled

112

the game. Instead, the Army followed its usual procedure
where matters of psychological warfare are concerned: it
bungled the job. Reporters at the front actually heard the
instructions being passed down to the men. One radio corre-
spondent made a tape recording of the order being read.
Naturally, they filed stories.

From then on, for the next week, there was nothing but
general panic and confusion in Seoul. Some reporters, who
had not been at the front, got garbled versions of the order
and these men put out stories to the effect that an actual
state of cease-fire existed. (There could not have been a
cease-fire, of course, when we were ready to fire whenever
the enemy did; it was a partial cease-fire, at best, an engraved
invitation for the enemy to participate in a cease-fire if he so
desired.)

General Van Fleet was forced to correct immediately the
impression that his army was through fighting. He had to
maintain his men's vigilance at all costs. He also could not
afford to let the enemy relax. So he took two steps to correct
the newspaper accounts. First, he released a statement to the
effect that his mission was still "to kill Chinese" and "repel
Communist aggression in Korea. . . . There is hope [for
peace] " he said, "but that hope must not be sabotaged by
wishful thinking." Then, for his second step, the general un-
leashed a tremendous barrage of U.N. artillery across the
front just to show the enemy we were not softening.

The "phony cease-fire" as it was called at the time was
a worth-while trick. Unfortunately, however, the Army failed
to realize as it usually did that when it wanted to pky
psychological warfare it ought to have cut in the men who
could make or break any such program with one headline:
the correspondents.

vm

NO ONE was angrier over the "phony cease-fire" debacle in
Korea than President Harry S. Truman. For an agency re-
porter, sitting in Seoul, Korea 7500 air miles from Washing-
ton, D.C. had written into his copy, in an effort to "needle**
it (make it sound more important than it was), that "Orders
from the highest sources, possibly from the White House it-
self, brought the ground fighting to a complete but temporary
halt."

Back in Key West, Florida, on vacation he wasn't even at
the White House Harry Truman had a fit. He called a press

114

conference, where he took the occasion to read the White
House reporters a statement on press responsibility: "I hope
everyone understands now that there has been no cease-fire
in Korea and that there can be none until an armistice has
been signed," he scolded. **. . . We cannot allow our men to
be caught off balance by the enemy. . . /* Then he launched
into an off-the-record lecture to back up what he had read.
He related how, as an artillery officer in France, he was read-
ing a headline one day announcing an armistice just as a Ger-
man 150-millimeter shell burst no more than a hundred yards
away. That armistice story was a fake, he said. This cease-fire
story was a fake too- You must be careful in these very dan-
gerous times to stick to the truth, he warned the reporters.
**I understand this story came out," he said, "because of in-
tense competition in Seoul. Well, it seems to me that the
welfare of the United States, the United Nations, and the
world is much more important than any competitive situation
that may exist among newshounds.** Then, still angry, the
President sat down.

The President's understanding was correct There were
dozens of reporters in Korea, most of them working for rival
newspapers and news agencies, and when a major story came
along they fell all over themselves trying to squeeze a little
more juice from the story than the opposition. The Tiflfo often
ran redder with blood in the news columns than they actually
did on the terrain of Korea.

News, to a news agency, is a competitive business. And he
who provides the newspaper editors at home with the best
yarn and gets it there fir st is, by agency standards, the best
reporter. If one agency circulates a story over its wires saying
there were 12,000 Chinese in a certain attack, the other
agencies if they want to sell their stories must increase the
number to at least 15,000, or giet ready for a curt message

SUBSTITUTE FO R VICTORY 115

from the circulation-wise home office demanding, "How,
please?"

Perhaps the worst example of this sort of thing came in
April 1953, when the first batch o sick and wounded U.N.
prisoners was sent to Panmunjom by the Communists for
repatriation. As the ambulances were unloaded, most news-
men had but one story in mind atrocities and their pencils
were sharpened and their questions loaded for that story.
Each struggling reporter lived in fear that another reporter
would dig up two "Death Valley" stories to his one, or that a
prisoner with an especially grisly story to tell would get past
hirp.

There is no doubt that the enemy perpetrated a good
number of atrocities. For he was a ruthless opponent who
went about using his prisoners for his own political purposes.
But that should have been no surprise. What did we expect
from an enemy whose religious attitude toward life, whose
level of civilization, whose medical sMQ and knowledge of
sanitation or disease, and whose physical equipment for
transporting prisoners in safety and comfort were aH far in-
ferior to ours from the start?

None of these extenuating circumstances should excuse the
enemy in any way for the actual atrocities he committed. And
the bona fide stories should serve to remind us of the suffer-
ing our men endured. But neither should the stories be
allowed to get out of hand and whip us into an emotional
response which belies our own intelligence and our own level
of civilization.

One U.S. Senator, questioned about the reported enemy
atrocities and facing a campaign for re-election, as the inter-
viewing reporters must have known replied indignantly that
the U.S. ought to drop the atomic bomb immediately on all
those guilty of perpetrating them. An eye for an eye, an

116

atrocity for an atrocity, was this Senator's solution assuming,
of course, the feasibility of rounding up all the tough prison
guards and all the derelict enemy medics, then holding them
still long enough, on suitable atomic terrain, while we flew
a B-36 overhead and got our aim.

<e We cannot have a peaceful, stable world,** said Senator
McCarthy, "unless we have the friendship and respect of the
people of the Orient:* The senator's recipe for achieving that
friendship? We should send a message, he sputtered, to the
Chinese who were reported at the time to be withholding
some U.N. prisoners and tell them this: "You return those
men, not next week, not next month, you wiH do it imme-
diately, or we will wipe your accursed Communist leaders
who are responsible from the face of the earth." The angry
Senator did not stipulate how we were to accomplish that
feat; presumably he, too, had the atomic bomb in mind.

Actually, with the exception of several outbursts of savage
Oriental cruelty in the early days of the war and a
clumsy attempt to make propaganda by forcing germ-warfare
confessions from some of our flyers the Communists treated
most of our prisoners about as well as they treated their own
soldiers. Should we have expected more? Most of the pris-
oners themselves, who were not running for election and
were contented enough only to be home, did not seem to
think so.

When the first groups of sick prisoners arrived at Panmun-
jom, reporters were not allowed to do much talking with
them. The Army was anxious to sort out the probable mental
and political cases before the men were interviewed. The
press interviews, therefore, were postponed until the men
reached their Army hospital wards in Tokyo, where special
press rooms were set aside, complete with tape recorders,
bright lights for the newsreds, and a staff of censors to see to

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 117

it that the men did not compromise the chances of their
buddies whom they had left behind.

One by one the men were brought down to the press room
and placed in the center of a battery of cameras, lights, mi-
crophones, and eager reporters.

Invariably the first question after "How does it fed to
be back?" would be something like this: "Well, Corporal, tdl
us about your atrocity/* Some of the men did have gruesome
stories to tell. They had seen men dying of tuberculosis and
dysentery (diseases aH Orientals die of themselves, by the
thousands). They had been forced to inarch forty or fifty
miles to their camps (because the enemy had few trucks and
the U.N. was strafing and bombing what trucks he had to
prevent them from carrying ammunition) . Usually the worst
cases were picked up eventually by a truck and sent on
ahead. But in the meanwhile many men died trying to keep
up with the pace. (Because of that, you could call it a
TDeath March.*) The ex-prisoners sitting there in the hospital
remembered how they nearly starved because the enemy
lacked food (we tried to see to it that he lacked enough for
his own men too) . Many of them had heard about buddies
being beaten by brutal guards when they did not behave
( Orientals often resort to this practice as a matter of habit).
And they told of having to attend propaganda classes in
which the men were forced to listen, day after day, to lec-
tures on the glories of Communism and the horrors of democ-
racy. (The prisoners we held at Koje-do were given daily
lectures on the horrors of Communism and the glories of
democracy.)

Many of them had been packed together into tiny, rat-
infested hovels (we bombed all the barracks, unless they
bore plain POW markings on the roofs). But for the most
part die men I heard tell their stories did not consider them

118

to be examples of atrocities. They had not expected much
when they got captured. They knew they had been fighting
a rough, relatively backward enemy. And when their number
came up and they were forced to crawl down the other side
of their hills, in front of enemy burp guns, most of them had
withdrawn into a shell of numbness and fatalism and had,
because it was the smartest thing to do, just died a little.

There was one Puerto Rican soldier in the Tokyo hospital
I shall never forget. He was brought into the room in a
wheel chair, because both of his legs were gone. They had
been amputated above the knee by Chinese doctors when it
was discovered the boy had contracted gangrene on his way
to the prison camp. One arm lay badly mangled in a cast.
Perspiring under the newsreel lights and trying to remember
to speak into the microphone, he slowly described his care.
The enemy had not had much to work with, he said, but he
seemed to think the Chinese doctor had done the best he
could. He had long since become resigned to the feeling that
his luck had been bad.

"Well," said a reporter, trying to work the story into some-
thing more usable on the front pages at home, "you would
say you were pretty badly treated, wouldn't you?"

The Puerto Bican made a final effort to make his audience
understand how he really felt "No," he said, "I wouldn't say
I was treated bad. And I wouldn't say I was treated good.
I'd say I was treated just fair."

The reporter sighed and the man was wheeled back to his
ward, past another man tie assembled corps of newsmen
hoped would have a "better** story.

One day, when the interviews were over and one Donald
Legay, a twenty-three-year-old corporal from Leominster,

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 119

Massachusetts, was being escorted back to his ward, I tagged
along and asked hi if he would mind spending a little time
in some quiet corner with me, to spell his story out at his own
speed, sans lights, sans microphones, sans cameras. He
agreed, and we found a spot in one of the lounges.

Legay was still trying to get used to the idea that he was
really free. And he could hardly believe his luck. Doctors
and nurses hovered over him, examining his wounded left
arm and trying to make hi comfortable. Army interrogators
had patiently recorded his stories for the files. Intelligence
men had cleared him of all suspicions of being ^progressive."
A Post Exchange cart came right to his bed with supplies of
candy and cigaretteswhich he chain-smoked to help relieve
his jumpy nerves. And a long-distance call had been placed
for him to Leominster, Massachusetts, so he could visit with
his folks. Seven times a day someone came up to his bed with
a tray of something to eat or drink North Korea seemed a
million miles away, and as Legay talked with me he con-
tentedly summed it all up: Tft's just like being in heaven."

Legay's story could be called an atrocity case history. For
it is full of discomfort, pain, despair, and enemy stupidity.
But it is bad enough, just the way he tells it, without giving
it a label

Legay fell into enemy hands on November 4, 1950, when
his unit was attacked by a company of Chinese who were
freshly arrived in the Korean war and who swarmed around
Legay's position, blowing their bugles and screaming.

"When they took us off the hill that night," he recounted,
*Ve were so scared we thought we'd never see the rest of the
world again.

*TThe Chinese had hit Cav [1st Cavalry Division]* Legay
said, "and we went up on a hill behind Cav so they could
pull back through us. Then the Chinese came at us. They

120

hit us about ten that morning and we fought all day. I got it

through the left arm. Two slugs. Our medic was already

wounded, but he tried to patch me up. Then he died. Finally,

around four in the afternoon, they overran us for the last

time.

The Chinese took us down the hill and started marching
us to the rear. They had just about all of my company. Most
of us could walk, and we carried our buddies who couldn't.
They marched us only at night. My wound was leaking so
bad I was soaking wet all the way down my left leg. After
three nights I was so weak I couldn't walk any more myself.
About that time they got some trucks and hauled us the
rest of the way up to the Yalu,

"They put us in a dirty little village," he went on. "Nothing
but mud huts. That was all the camp consisted of, and that's
where I stayed all the time I was there. There were fourteen
of us in one house. I guess altogether there were about a
thousand of us in this one village. There wasn't any barbed
wire. Just guards. But they knew we couldn't go anywhere.

~We'd get up about dawn, and for two or three hours we
cleaned up the camp and had physical training. I was ex-
cused from that because of my bad arm. They made me just
sit back and take it easy. For breakfast we had rice and some
soy beans. We only had water to drink until some of us got
the idea of parching barley and making a kind of coffee out
of it After breakfast we had work details or just sat around.
At first they made us go to school, where they were building
up their own kind of government and tearing ours down. We
had to go to a lot of lectures. We didn't have any radios, but
they had a PA system in the camp and they were always
playing Chinese or Russian music over that or making an-
nouncements all the time. There wasn't much news. They
didn't tell us about Eisenhower's election until three months

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 121

after it was over. They did tell us about Stalin's death. We got
quite a thrill over that.

"About four o'clock every day we had our second and last
meal of the day. It was usually something cooked up out of
flour. Maybe some turnip or potato soup. There was a little
pork sometimes. But that's about all you could say for it. It
was just there. I lost a lot of weight on that diet. I weighed
165 when they got me, but I went down so far I looked like a
human skeleton. I could hardly walk, and I was so afraid to
look at myself I never took off my shirt, even in the summer-
time.

"When the peace talks first started, and it looked like we
might be coming home, the food got a little better. But then
it tapered off into slop again when the talks bogged down.
We could always tell how things were going by bow bad the
chow was. Just before we started down for Panmunjbm,
though, they rustled up some eggs and french fries and things
like that, and they really tried to put it out I weighed 145
when I got here.**

Next to the inferior food and the scarcity even of that,
Legay's worst memories were of the medical care he received.
Just before he was captured he was given first aid by his own
medic who was himself doomed to die in the battle and
despite the fact that his arm was broken and infected, this
was nearly the last attention Legay got in twenty-nine
months of prison life.

* They didn't have any bandages," he says, ~so they made
a bandage out of my OD undershirt I didn't even have a
sling and had to carry my bum left arm with my good right
one. I never had a cast Two days after I was captured a
North Korean medic put a splint on me, but then some
Chinese came along and took it off." This was unusual; the
Chinese were usually more humane than the Koreans. "From

122

then on the doctors didn't do much of anything. The bones
moved around in my arm and it hurt like hell all winter.
One of the doctors was so doped up all the time he couldn't
do anything if he wanted to. 'Hopeless cases/ we called them.
They didn't have anything to work with and they didn't
seem to care much. There was only one Chinese doctor who
ever took any interest in trying to help any of us. But he
didn't get there until last winter, almost two years after I
was wounded. He was a pretty good doctor. He moved in an
X-ray machine and I had my first X ray in January 1953. By
that time my arm had grown together crooked. He didn't do
anything about that, but last month, when they decided to
send me down, he gave me a local anesthetic and scraped
away at the bone to cut away the inf ectfonu Then he filled
the hole up with some cotton and wrapped it, and here I am."

The specialists hovering over Legay at Tokyo Army Hos-
pital told him they would rebreak and reset his arm when
he got back to the States, and that it would be as good as new.

But bad as the food and the medical attention were, Legay
decided the awful monotony of life in prison was even worse.

"We never got any packages. We had mail call every ten
days, and we were issued writing paper about three times a
month. But I don't think all my letters got home. They more
or less told us what to put in them if we wanted to get them
out Like how we were well treated. They kept telling us
how Truman was no good and Ridgway was no good and
how our whole government as a whole was no good. We had
to take part in discussions afterwards. Being there, you more
or less had to agree with them and keep going with it. After
a while some of the fellows agreed with them quite a bit.
"These fellows got extra privileges like not having to do any
work. We called them 'number one boys/ There were quite
a few of them. After a while we didn't have to gp to the

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 123

lectures if we didn't want to. Some of the fellows kept on
going, though some of the number one boys.

"Sometimes some of the guys would rebel against the lec-
tures or refuse to eat the food. The guards always pulled out
an instigator, though, and sent him to a labor cainp. The guys
who went there never came back. And the guys who tried to
escape didn't get nowhere. When they got back they seemed
to see things the Commie way.

"As for myself, I wasn't mistreated. And I never saw any-
one beaten up or anything like that Once I saw a fellow
come back who'd been mistreated. I don't know what he'd
done, but they kept him in confinement outside the camp
for about a month. Then they brought him back and put him
in what they called 'the jail.' A lot of us had to help cany his
stuff back. They had to beat him the way he looked.

"We adjusted ourselves. We had no feeling we'd ever get
out. We'd just go along with it In the summertime we'd
plan what we'd do in the winter, and in the wintertime we'd
plan for the next summer. When I left, the guys were getting
ready to knock the mud out of the windows to cool the huts
off this summer. This winter theyll wall them up again to
keep warm." Legay did not know it then, but the war would
be over before winter came. * c Tliey gave us a couple of decks
of cards a year to keep us occupied, but they were pretty bad
cards. I got hold of an American deck here in the hospital and
couldn't hang onto it The cards were too slick.

~At first I'd just sit bade and pky cards or read. They told
me to take it easy. The other guys were out on work details.
I finally went to work a couple of months ago as an orderly,
just for something to do. I went for the chow and served it
for our squad. I didn't have to, though. About a fourth of
the guys went out of their heads from aH the monotony. They
were jittery all the time. They stayed right with us. Just

124

about everybody had given up and adjusted themselves to
the immediate camp. I never let things bother me. We didn't
have any American magazines to read. Only Commie stuff.
Russian magazines in English. The Daily Worker. And a few
books. I remember The Twilight of World Capitalism. And
there was a history of the Korean war floating around. But
you had to be a 'special* or a number one boy to get that. I
never got to read it.

"Sometimes we passed the time watching the air battles
over the Yalu. We really had a grandstand seat for that. We
were only about thirty miles from Sinanju, I guess, and we
could usually see the jets zooming around overhead and the
ack-ack going off. The Commies kept telling us how many
Sabres they were shooting down, but they never told us their
MIG losses. One day we saw a MIG hit the dirt just a little
ways away. The pilot went down with it and we cheered like
heU. The guards were mad, but they didn't do anything."

Then finally, on April 9, 1953, Legay learned about the
plan to repatriate some of the sick and wounded. Four days
kter the Chinese told him he was one of the chosen. They
gave him a watch to replace the one they'd confiscated when
he was captured, dressed up his wound, and started hi
down the road to Panmunjom.

"When I left," he says, *we had two fellows right in our
own company who were worse off than I was and we tried to
find out why they couldn't go too. But the Chinese claimed
they were too sick to move. They didn't want them to die
on the way home."

One of Legay's most vivid impressions on getting out was
the sight of American nurses in the Army hospital he was
taken to in Korea. That was something to see, a white
woman after all those slant-eyed ones."

Since that first small touch of the world he thought he'd

SUBSTTTUTE FOB VICTORY 125

never see again, Legay had kept busy sorting out his ideas
and his impressions. After two and a half years of "going
with it" his mind was naturally a confused mishmash of his
own beliefs, Red propaganda, and a long, monotonous night-
mare of playing cards, mudding up the windows in winter,
dangling a stiff, useless arm, and listening to Russian music
over a squawking public address system. Legay still main-
tained, *1 wasn't mistreated. 7 * And he seemed willing to ac-
cept the whole long episode of bad food and indifferent care
as proof not so much of the Communists* brutality as of their
pathetic inability to do any better by him if they'd wanted to.
After twenty-nine months under such uncomfortable condi-
tions he came to regard them as normal and routine, and to
check them off as one of the fortunes of going to war. But if
the Chinese sent Donald Legay back to his world ahead of
his buddies because they thought they had converted htm
into a number one boy, they were in for a rude shock.

Legay told me he was going back into the Army. And he
already had received an answer for the lengthy hours of in-
doctrination he sat through.

They used to tell us up there how our way of life was too
rich, how our standard of living was too high and how we
had to pay such high taxes to support our kind of government
and all that. They'd show us advertisements for American
cars and tell us that was just a bunch of propaganda. Well,*
Legay said as I left him, "when I talked over the phone to
my folks the other night they told me I had about four thou-
sand bucks of my Army pay saved up in the bank and that
they'd already picked out a convertible for me. Looks like
I've got a lot of good old American 'propaganda* waiting for
me when I get back."

IX

*Tm looking over a weU fought over
KOREA that I abhor., r

" Kisfor that krumby little country,
e (f is for the odor I despise,
*R* is for the rocky, blank-strewn hillside

SO WENT THE FIRST and more quotable lines of a couple
of ditties the men in Korea devised to describe how they felt
about the war, and which they are probably still singing
whenever the beer ration arrives at their front-line bunkers,
or at their barracks on the airfields. To anyone who has ever
had to fight in a war far from home such bitter, woeful lyrics
as these should sound more than appropriate. Just singing
them helps to make more palatable all the frustrations of be-
ing away from home, all the fears and the dangers which they
must face and the immense disgust with their unlucky lot

128

which can overwhelm an army of civilian soldiers anywhere.
Unfortunately, the frustrations and the loathing which
abounded in Korea were not always confined to harmless
battlefield ballads.

It is an ironic fact of war that a liberating army often finds
itself hating and even hurting the very country it is supposed
to be freeing. This was true among many of the Americans
who were in Italy in World War II. ( Not many men acquired
bells for their Adanos.) It was true in France in both World
Wars. And it was a problem of some magnitude in Korea. At
a time when the U.S. may have to send its young men into
many more lands, to man the fire engines and build the walls
against Communist aggression, it ought to be a cause for
some concern that quite a few of the men who will be going
will make better fighters than they will ambassadors though
both are badly needed in this kind of war and that in the
process of making themselves tough enough to combat the
enemy they are likely to spill over a good deal of damage,
both physical and psychological, on their allies as well

In January 1951, soon after he assumed command of the
Eighth Army in Korea, and several months before he was to
take over MacArthur's job in Tokyo, General Ridgway took
a quick look at the temper and attitudes of his men and then,
apparently with some alarm at what he saw, put his staff to
work immediately on an extensive program of troop orienta-
tion. In a personal statement, entitled **Why We Are Here,"
which served as a keynote for the campaign, Ridgway laid
it on the line: "Never have members of any military com-
mand had a greater challenge than we ... to show ourselves
and our people at their best and thus be a credit to those
who bred us."

The parents who had bred a good number of the men
would have been shocked had they known the extent of

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 129

Ridgway's problem. In isolated vilkges all across the wintry
front there were almost nightly incidents of assault and rape.
Some of the men, engaging in what they thought to be a
harmless sport, were using their rifles for target practice. And
their targets were more often than not the windows of Korean
buildings, valuable power-line insulators, and tie already
scarce Korean livestock.

In the supply depots especially in chaotic, miserable
Pusan entire shipments of American cigarettes, Army ra-
tions, and badly needed gasoline were funneled by their GI
handlers into a flourishing and lucrative black market And
on the narrow roads there was a popular game among truck
and jeep drivers which involved seeing how close they could
come to a frightened old Korean without actually hitting
him.

The Koreans themselves were partly at fault for the popu-
larity of that particular game. They are a superstitious aJctd,
in their way, very religious people. They believe in ancestor
worship, and they also have the idea that some of their kte
predecessors, in the form of evil spirits, are following them
around like shadows to torment them. When they saw the
jeeps and trucks careening down the road, many Koreans,
who felt especially harassed by spirits breathing down their
necks, devised a unique and rather resourceful way of getting
rid of them: the Koreans would wait until the jeep or truck
was almost upon them. Hien, like witless chickens, they
would run across the road, timing their dash so the vehicle
would just miss t. hem, perhaps even graze them a little. In
this way, they hoped, the spirit following them would be
hopelessly caught on the bumper and lolled.

But this idiosyncrasy of the Koreans, dangerous and annoy-
ing as it was> should not have excused the drivers who re-
ciprocated and decided that if the Koreans were that f atalis-

130

tic they deserved to get run down. The attitude on the part of
too many soldiers toward the country they were supposed to
be rescuing from the enemy could best be summed up in one
word: contempt.

At Army headquarters, Ridgway's education officers
started up their mimeograph machines and cranked out a
series of lessons on deportment for the troops. One of the first
brochures, engagingly titled "How to Alienate Friends and
Eliminate People," tackled the traffic problem. "Americans
are notably impatient,'* the pamphlet admitted. "But swear-
ing at the driver of an ox cart will not make the ox move any
faster. . . . We are not in this country as conquerors. . . . Cer-
tainly the residents of this nation have an inherent right to
travel their own streets and roadways without being threat-
ened and abused." To drive the message home, Ridgway's
headquarters designed a poster and hastily printed it, for lack
of any other paper, on the backs of some outdated terrain
maps. The poster showed a cursing GI jeep driver running
down a baffled Korean who was lugging a load of wood along
the road on his A-frame. Said the poster's tart slogan: ''Keep
your shirt on! After all it's his road!"

The mimeograph machines rolled on. '"Remember,'* ad-
vised another poop sheet, "that to our Korean allies personal
dignity ('Face') is as important as a healthy bankroll is to
most Americans." "No amount of aid will mean anything,"
read another statement, "unless accompanied by a friendly
smile and a little courtesy." Then, getting at the heart of the
matter, the Eighth Army told its more cocky soldiers off: "We
Americans are all too prone to compare other countries with
the United States. ... If there isnt an automobile in every
garage, a refrigerator in every kitchen, a radio in every liv-
ing room, and an indoor toilet in every house, the average
American looks upon that nation as primitive. ... At first

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 131

these differences are regarded with curiosity and interest
which later turns to derision." "You are the salesmen of
democracy," read still a later challenge. "Don't sell it short.**

This kind of frank talk helped to clear the air, and the in-
cidence of daily destruction and vandalism appeared gradu-
ally to lessen as a result. But no amount of mimeograph ink
could smother the soldier's private opinion that the ~ET in
Korea stood for Tcnnnby," or that the country's odd-looking
inhabitants were nothing but "gooks." (The Italians, to an
earlier American Anny, had been "wops/* and the French
"frogs.")

In all fairness, it should be said that only a small per-
centage of the men engaged in overt acts of destruction. But
even those soldiers who behaved themselves could not resist
falling into the pattern of contempt for a country so dirty and
so strange. It should also be added, in fairness to all lie men,
that their opinions of Korea were not altogether unreason-
able.

As seen from the back of a jolting 2%-ton Army trade, or
from under the rim of a heavy steel helmet, few countries
would look very attractive. Korea had less of a chance than
most. Its mountainous scenery, though extremely beautiful in
spots, was so tough to climbespecially under full pack and
so difficult to dig a hole into for protection that the occasional
charm which was offered by the TLand of the Morning Calm**
was completely losL The roads were so few, and so incredibly
bad where they existed at aH, that merely getting from one
battle to another was a nightmare for an army whose men
were used, from childhood, to riding something wherever
they wanted to go.

In summer the roads sent up a choking cloud of flourlike
dust and the men. driving them had to resort to face masks to
keep from suffocating except when the same roads were

132

oozing away in the torrential rains. Korea is probably one of
the few countries in the world where one can ride over a
summer road just after a rain and suffer from dust, so quick
is the transformation. The night air was filled with swarms
of relentless mosquitoes. And in winter the cold was so severe
and penetrating that no amount of clothing would keep a
man really warm. Riding with a tank task force in an attack
on Munsan in the early spring of 1951, 1 tried the GI method
of keeping warm: during frequent halts to clear mines from
the road ahead of us, I climbed up on the radiator of a tank
which was just ahead of my jeep in the column. But that was
even worse. The exhaust from the tank's idling engine was so
full of carbon monoxide that it nearly made me sick. As it
was, it caused several of the GIs to double up in unconscious-
ness. It was better merely to freeze.

The people, too by our standards, at least were rather
queer and unprepossessing. Their faces, perhaps because of
centuries of cruel oppression, were stoic and expressionless,
and so lacking in visible signs of personality that most Ko-
reans seemed, to the average observer, to be sullen, vacuous,
and exactly alike.

Sociologists have decided that the Koreans are more like
the rugged, temperamental natives of the cold Russian
steppes than like any other nearby race. They are taller than
the Japanese, and shorter than the average Chinese. They are
also less intellectual than the Chinese, some of whose ideas
mostly Confucian they have borrowed and carried to such
rigid, even irrational, extremes that the Korean father is an
absolute tyrant in his house. And despite the Korean gifts
with ceramics, painting, and metalwork, they are less aes-
thetic than the Japanese, who have copied many of their
ideas and rounded off the sharp Korean edges. The Koreans*
social merits are few and primitive. Their homes are neat and

SUBSTITUTE FOB VICTORY 133

well constructed. In fact, because of the fireplace, which is
placed under the floor of the most important room in each
house, they can probably be credited with having invented
radiant heating.

But even this does not make them a warm people. In the
long, freezing winters they seem to store up their temper and
exuberance, like a tiger in hibernation. Then, when spring
comes, they explode with violent arguments and fatal stone
fights. Their language is a baffling mixture of Turkish, Fin-
nish, and Manchu dialects. It is almost impossible to learn.
The inhabitants of Korea are a bewildering group of people,
and most foreigners find themselves, for a variety of reasons,
either loving them or hating them.

And the country's odor is bad. The offal, instead of going
down the sewerwhich does not exist is collected instead in
wooden buckets and hauled to the open fields to be used as
fertilizer. Many a careless jeep driver has had to spend a half
day or more washing his vehicle after rounding a corner too
fast, skidding into a honey-bucket cart, and overturning it
The streets of Pusan, crowded with thousands of refugees,
reeked with the smell of defecation. For most Koreans, young
and old, fhmlr nothing of relieving themselves wherever and
whenever they feel the urge.

As if this were not bad enough, the Koreans also have
chosen for their national dish a concoction which they cafl
Jdmchi. This is a foul-smelling mess of fermented cabbage,
onions, and garlic. The longer it ferments before eating the
better. Nearly all Koreans love it its spicy tang helps keep
them warm in the freezing climate and the odor, which is
nauseating to the uninitiated, lingers for several days after a
meal and seems to precede its owner through the streets in
a strong, vaporous cloud several feet in radius. (Kimchi in-
spired a few GI ballads on its own, most of which are scato-

134

logical in theme.) One U.S. officer, commenting once on the
number of rape cases he had to investigate in his unit, won-
dered how any man could even look at a Korean woman-
shy, for the most part homely, flat-chested, dressed in a color-
ful but unflattering high-waisted skirt, and usually smelling
strongly of kimchi and have any further desire, even to
linger, much less repose.

Such was the surface impression the soldier got from
Korea, and on which he naturally based a good deal of his
behavior there. There were plenty of extenuating circum-
stances for those who cared to look for them. Living on a
narrow, rocky, and vulnerable appendage to Asia has given
the Koreans a tremendous feeling of insecurity. And their
long centuries of complete subjugation, to Chinese invaders
or Japanese conquerors, have so deprived them of political
maturity and material progress that their sense of inferiority
often reaches the level of complete self-deprecation. Koreans
are also a frank and direct people. After watching them shove
each other around in the market place, after seeing their
youngsters pky their ruthless game with rocks in which the
point of the game is to bring blood and after learning of
their standard procedure for discipline in the army a severe
beating or hefty slaps in the face one gets the impression
that they dislike themselves almost as much as other people
do.

Strangely enough, the net result of this lack of group
humanity and charity toward one another seems to be a feel-
ing of personal self-reliance and individual pride which
would have done Emerson's heart good. There is no concept
of organized social consciousness in Korea. Charity for the
poor is a matter of family, not state, concern. I once spent
several days among the wretched, dirty little beggar boys of
Pusan the Korean version of the Italian shoeshine boys.

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 135

They are a pathetic lot They have lost their families. They
have no clothes except those on their backswhich are filthy.
Many of them are suffering from advanced cases of tuber-
culosis. Their only source of income or of food is the occa-
sional candy bar which a passing GI will give them, just to
make them quit bothering him. They sleep huddled together
in shivering groups in the damp gutters of Pusan's dismal
dock area. And yet, when they are rounded up by the U. S.
Army and taken to Korean orphanages or hospitals to be
cared for, they escape as soon as they can and make their way
back to the street. They are happier there, on their own, than
in the snug, if crowded, wards of an organized home.

The Koreans do not bow and scrape and disarm their ac-
quaintances with a wide, saccharine smile as do some Ori-
entals. They are almost cold and haughty in their pride,
lliere were fewer sights more moving during the war than
that of a lone Korean woman trudging bravely down a de-
serted road just ahead of the advancing enemy, her remark-
ably sturdy physique proudly erect under the weight of her
belongings on her head and of the baby on her back. She did
not whimper. And she could handle the situation alone.

But the visiting soldier, burdened with the tormenting dis-
comforts of the battlefield and harried by the constant pos-
sibility of instant death in defense of this *f ouled-up* place
had little time to notice these compensating traits. In Eu-
rope, where I happened to be an infantry officer, I often had
to cope with the fact that some of my men frankly, some-
times crudely, preferred the autocratic German enemy to the
liberty-loving French ally, regardless of the principles in-
volved, and usually for the simple reason that the Germans
had better plumbing, an easier language to understand, and
fairer complexions. They were more "our kind" of people. In
Korea the same standards prevailed. As a result and the dis-

136

comforting fact should be recognized at home a good num-
ber of American soldiers were more prejudiced than open-
minded, more crude than gentle, more profane than polite,
and more arrogant than democratic. The impression these
men made on the Koreans even though they were in the
minority did not advance our cause or our reputation.

Mulling over this problem one night, I asked a number of
South Korean acquaintances of mine to tell me frankly what
American characteristics they found least attractive. (One
can often learn about another person by ascertaining his im-
pressions of oneself.) The Koreans* most frequent judgment
on Americans was: "Your relentless preoccupation with sex."
Now the Korean moral code is probably one of the most
puritanic in existence. And unlike the American code, it is
adhered to strictly. Virginity, among both men and women, is
common. Social dancing is prohibited by law as unseemly.
And before a movie can be shown in a Korean theater it is
supposed to be trimmed first of all kissing scenes a rule
which naturally makes mincemeat of many an American im-
port.

The Koreans themselves do not kiss in public, and they
would rather not see other people doing it. Their love-mak-
ing, in fact, is about as staid and unadorned by displays of
emotion and affection even in private as it is possible for
love-making to get. When a Korean woman marries, she goes
to her husband's house, attaches herself as a servant to her
mother-in-law, and keeps quietly in her place. In the typical
home she does not speak to her husband unless he speaks to
her first Her duty is to keep house, cook up the batches of
kimchi, and bear her husband a son so that the family line
wifl be maintained. There is little or no romance.

Even when a Korean and his wife or fiancee had been
separated by the war for several months, it was not unusual,

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 137

upon their reunion, for them to greet each other solemnly and
sedately on the street, exactly as if they were passing ac-
quaintances who had already passed on the street three times
before on the same morning. There was no visible emotion.
It is not difficult to imagine the impact made on this particu-
lar, and sacred, segment of Korean custom by the wolfish and
irrepressible GL

A Korean who had made his way back into Seoul after a
long absence brought about by the war told me once what a
difficult time he had getting his family to open the gate when
he returned. It seemed the neighborhood had been plagued
for days by a group of extremely persistent American
Romeos, and everyone was keeping his house tightly locked
and bolted against all comers. At night, whenever a jeep or
truck was heard in the streets outside, his family blew out the
candles and hid.

A young English-speaking kwyer named Min Choon Sifc
recalled a night in Pusan when he was accosted by four GIs.
"One of them had a club and another carried a whip/" Min
said. 'TTiey came up to me and said, *Sezy! Sexy! [Hie stand-
ard password on these patrols.] Where is girl?' I said I was
sorry but I was a stranger and didn't know. One of them hit
me in the face with his fist"

Eighth Army's campaign against this sort of thing was con-
tinued vigorously under General Van Fleet. Though his of-
ficers claimed the record of assault was no worse in Korea
t^Rrt ft had been in any other large military campaign and
no worse, perhaps, *hTi it is in any average U.S. city, for that
matterthe general had to take time out from his military
worries several times a week to study a stack of papers on his
desk relating to general courts-martial which involve cases
comparable, in civilian life, to felonies. Approximately a
fourth of these cases involved crimes of violence against the

188

South Koreans. Most of these concerned sex crimes of a
Tieinous" nature, and they ran all the way from manslaughter
and rape to sodomy occasionally involving an unfortunate
Korean boy who had been lured behind a pile of rubble and
forced into compliance. The errant GI's possession of loaded
weapons which were sometimes used to force the issue and
the secure sense of anonymity which a uniform and presence
in a backward country a long way from home afforded him,
gave the record a primitive and degrading twist it would not
have had at home.

One of the more widely publicized cases of violence against
South Koreans happened to involve Canadian troops, though
it was a typical case and could easily have happened to any
of the contingents. On the night of March 17, 1952, the men
of the Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry had been
removed from the line for a brief rest and were celebrating
the occasion with a rousing beer bust Sometime during the
evening seven of the soldiers set out from their regimental
camp in a jeep to find some women. In their search they en-
tered the nearby village of Chung Woon Myon and came
across a small Korean house which was crowded that evening
with many people: the aged owner, his wife, a homeless boy
from across the street, seven refugees who had sought shelter
for the night, a half dozen ROK soldiers under the command
of their lieutenant, who were temporarily billeted in the
house, and two young women, one of whom was the sister-in-
law of the ROK lieutenant and had come over to visit with
him for the first time in several months. The other girl was
a friend she had brought along.

The Canadians, who had celebrated well, were advised
when they knocked on the door that the house was a respect-
able one, and two of them meekly departed. The others, not
so easily discouraged, stayed behind and three of them de-

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 139

cided they were going to accomplish their mission whether
the girls and their Korean friends agreed or not They entered
the house, the women promptly screamed, the ROK soldiers
came to the rescue from an adjoining room, and after a brief
fist fight all around the outnumbered Canadians were ejected
from the house. As they went, however, one of them un-
limbered a grenade he had been wearing at the front and
tossed it into the room, killing the lieutenant and two of his
men.

After several weeks of waiting while the men were traced
and the evidence was assembled, the tragic story was finally
brought before a Canadian military court. The setting, a
strange blending of Canadian and Korean motifs, was a room
on the second floor of a schoolhouse in Seoul, which had been
fenced in with barbed wire and served at the time as a Cana-
dian stockade for offending troops. Two blackboards in the
well-scrubbed room still bore their lessons in Korean script
Behind three long tables, which were covered with Canadian
army blankets for decoration, sat the six officers of the gen-
eral court-martial, including three colonels with legal train-
ing who had been flown from Canada especially for the oc-
casion. Above the table the Canadian flag was tacked across
a window. And above the flag hung the portraits of King
George and Queen Elizabeth, the latter slightly askew.

The three soldiers, who had been accused in the charge
sheets of murder and attempted rape, were tried separately.
As each trial began the defendant was marched into the room
at quickstep, sworn in, and then seated to one side with his
defense counsel who had also been flown from Canada to
see that the men were given a fair triaL Nearby was the cap-
tain who was acting as prosecutor in the case, and in front
of him, as the only link between Korea and Canada between
King George and the ROK lieutenant was a young Korean

140

named Bill Surh, who had once been a prosperous Seoul
trader and was now employed by the Canadian brigade as its
interpreter. In the center of the room, facing the court, was
the witness chair.

One by one the Korean witnesses were brought into the
room by a Canadian guard, led to the witness chair, and
sworn in through Surh who held a scrap of paper on which
the official Canadian oath, which had to be used in the trial,
was written out in Korean characters. The witnesses included
the two girls, the ROK soldiers who had survived the gre-
nade, some Korean MPs who had been first on the scene, the
homeless boy from across the street, and the owner of the
house, a frail old papa-son with a white beard whose name
was Lee Pong Ku. Lee was blind in one eye and so nearly
deaf that he had to lean patiently into Surh's face to hear the
questions Bill put to him. He explained at the start that his
wife, ill at home and nearly insane as a result of frequent
Allied bombings near the village, was unable to testify.

The prosecutor-captain asked endless, interlocking ques-
tions as he tried to pin down the meager and elusive evi-
dence: What did the soldiers look like? It was too dark, said
Lee, and no one actually saw their faces. But they wore
berets. What time did the soldiers come? Mr. Lee explained
that as he had never had a watch he had no conception of
time. What time of year was it, then? Lee had no calendar,
he said, so he could not be sure. The boy later testified that
he knew nothing about "March," but that the incident had
taken place ten days after the second moon. The prosecutor
nodded wearily and the court reporter duly noted the answer
in the record. What did you hear, that night? the prosecutor
asked the boy while he was on the stand. The boy said he had
heard the girls scream. Any other voices? Yes. What voices?
Foreign. What kind of foreign voices? American, said the

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 141

boy, who, like most Koreans, thought that all the strangers
in South Korea those days must have been Americans. The
Court, which had other evidence on the Canadians, could
only smile.

On the tenth day the last of the three trials was over, all of
the evidence had been painstakingly pieced together, and
justice, of a sort, had been done. There were still appeals to
be heard in Canada but the local panel sentenced one of the
men to two years minus a day, another was given eighteen
months, and the third man, who had thrown the grenade, was
given a life sentence for manslaughter.

As the men were led away, their officers, including the re-
luctant prosecutor, were anxious to forget the embarrassing
case and get back to Canada or on with the war. Old Lee
Pong Ku was anxious to forget it too. He had patiently tried
to answer all the puzzling questions, but he had become very
homesick during his long stay in Seoul and he wanted to re-
turn home to his ailing wife. It had seemed to bun like a lot
of unneccessary bother, he told another Korean. After aB,
what was done was done. And he knew that if a ROK soldier
had been accused of such a crime the man would simply have
been taken out and shot These "Americans" were strange
people, he said.

But these isolated cases of real violence did less damage to
the Allied reputation in Korea than smaller, more frequent,
and more subtle blows at the Koreans blows which were
aimed more at their dignity than at their chastity, arose more
out of thoughtlessness than from brutality, and hurt all the
more because they were more numerous and more petty.

As part of a campaign to woo and encourage understand-
ing of the war in Japai* who did not particularly relish the
idea of our using her as a base from which to fight Commu-

142

nism; she was afraid she would get dragged in too General
Ridgway's Tokyo public relations staff sent a platoon of Japa-
nese journalists to Korea and installed them at the press
billets in Seoul. The Korean boys who waited on tables there
in the correspondents' mess, and who were old enough to re-
member the Japanese occupation with hatred, were shocked
at the prospect of having to serve their former masters again,
so soon, and under American auspices. To them it seemed
rather tactless.

The Kaesong talks had just begun, and a group of the Japa-
nese was given permission to go as far north as Munsan,
where they boarded the train provided there as living and
working quarters for the press. At noon one day they were in
the rickety dining car, happily eating lunch, when a South
Korean lieutenant stopped by for a bite. He happened to be
an official correspondent for the ROK army, and so he was
more than entitled to press privileges. If one of us had been
caught at a ROK outfit at lunch, the Koreans would have
been most hospitable. Instead the American mess sergeant
halted the lieutenant and told hi he could not eat there.
Without a trace of emotion on his face the officer departed.
As he drove away the sergeant remarked loudly that if he let
one Korean aboard "all of the god-damned gooks in Korea
would try to get a meal here.** Our recent enemies could eat;
but our present allies could not. Since there was no ROK unit
within miles the lieutenant presumably searched out a Ko-
rean farmer and shared a pot of kimchi.

Lee Jong Hee, an articulate young Korean who had a great
liking for Americans but was conscious, as a friend, of some
of their faults, analyzed the problem this way: "A lot of the
bad feeling between Americans and South Koreans," he sug-
gested in a bull session one night, **is due to the language
barrier and to your ignorance of our customs. When your

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 143

soldiers cannot make themselves understood they often get
angry and start cursing or swinging at us. Koreans are very
slow-moving. It is an honored tradition that a Korean gentle-
man walks along the street slowly and sucks very calmly on
his pipe. It is bad manners to hurry. After all, we are an old
nation, more than four thousand years, and it hurts when you
Americans, who are young and do not like slow motion, show
too much contempt for our ways. Some of our customs must
seem very strange. And we are a little country. But there are
many of us who love it/ 7

An old woman who was too ill and weak to leave Seoul
during the shifting tides of war had her troubles with the
North Korean, Chinese, and American occupations. She ad-
mitted one day to a neighbor, who passed her observation
along to my interpreter, that of them all she had the most
respect for the Chinese. They were disciplined and polite,
she said. When they wanted something from her house-
usually food or a place to lie down they would first knock on
her door. (The Chinese, we learned from intelligence, had
been given strict orders to make friends, not enemies, of the
South Korean populace. ) Then they apologized for troubling
her, consoled her for her sickness, and, as is the custom in
Asia, removed their shoes before they entered. The North
Koreans, she added, had behaved not quite so well, but about
the same.

"And the Americans?" her neighbor asked. TDidn't they
knock or apologize?**

She smiled and shook her head, the neighbor related. **No,~
she said. **They came right in. Usually they took just some
little thing for their girls. An umbrella or a teapot Or a
mirror."

"The GI always seems to rtmtlc that his girl is the cream of
the Korean crop,** Bill Surh, the Canadian court interpreter,

144

jokingly told me one night. "She's the best He's even got her
wearing lipstick and the American-style dresses he got from a
catalogue. He's certain that just as soon as he leaves the
Koreans will all race to take her over. He thinks they'll all
want this beautiful new thing he has created. He doesn't
know Koreans. These girls will be ruined. No one will many
them.

"Our word for 'prostitute/ * Bill went on, "is gaLbo. It's a
nasty word, because Koreans have no use for these girls.
They're scum. But we've got another word that is even worse.
It's yang-galbo* And it means 'prostitute for foreigners.' You
can't get any lower than that in fhfq country. Any girl who
went around with Americans is automatically yang-galbo,
especially if she starts wearing lipstick and American dresses. .
Even girls from good families, who worked for you because
they learned English in a good school ai^d made good secre-
taries, are yang-gcXbo to most Koreans. All they have to do is
ride home once in their boss's jeep and the kids all start jeer-
ing at them. 3 *

Hie enemy, whose attempts at psychological warfare were
usually more humorous than effective, recognized this cleav-
age early in the war and did what he could to capitalize on
the U.N. soldiers' well-known weakness for sex. "Officers and
soldiers of the ROK Army!" read a ringing leaflet sent down
once from the North Korean People's Army. "While you are
dying on the front lines in a senseless civil strife among
brothers, American soldiers are destroying your home life-
playing with Korean women YOUR MOTHERS, WIVES AND

The document ended with a gossipy item worthy of Walter
WindieO: "The wife of the ROK 9th Division Personnel Of-
ficer has been having a good time with an American officer

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 145

since her husband was sent to the front. BE ON YOUR GUARD!*

There is no record of the 9th Division personnel officer's
having taken this gossip seriously. Even if he did, he prob-
ably was more angry with his wife than with the Americans.
For most Koreans accepted the Americans, faults and all, with
a good deal more patience than we accepted them. And they
were prone to rationalize our behavior with politeness and
tolerance. There was never a sign of open hostility or even of
open criticism. It was only after I became rather well ac-
quainted with the Koreans that I ever heard a word of com-
plaint. And then it came from Koreans who happened to like
Americans themselves and thought we ought to know exactly
how we stood with some of the rest of their people.

Suh Chin Won, a girl of twenty whose father was a Na-
tional Assemblyman and whose mother was a major in the
Women's Police Corps and who herself wanted more than
anything to come to the U.S. so she could return to help edu-
cate Korea's children was typical of the more thoughtful
Korean who tried to reconcile both sides of the question.
**Koreans stand firm on the side of Americans," she told me at
a dinner one night, "even if there are many rapes and vio-
lence. They have suffered too much to mind such things. 5 *

Others, in the same spirit of gratitude, excused the offend-
ing soldiers on the grounds that they were far from home and
that the terrible pressures of combat and the severe demands
on their courage and on their very lives were enough to
cause any group of men to be rougher and cruder than they
would be ordinarily.

Bill Surh, the court interpreter, even felt it was fortunate
for his country in the long run that we were challenging its
traditions and scoffing at some of its customs. It was high
time, he thougjht, that Korea gpt a good dose of Western
ideas and took them to heart.

146

My interpreter and I happened on the scene in Seoul one
night just after a GI had shot a prostitute who had made the
mistake of turning him down. Instead of being horrified, my
interpreter said, the neighbors were all murmuring, "Well
done, well done/* So far as they were concerned, the soldier
had helpfully eliminated from their society another yang-
galbo.

There was little the Army could do in cases like this but to
punish the culprit if and when they found him. No amount
of mimeograph ink could change overnight the character of
the soldiers who, until recently, had been civilians. That job
had to begin back home, in the families, in the schools, and in
all the media of public education, including the amusement
industries. I have gone into the matter here, not because such
problems were out of hand in Korea most of the men be-
haved themselves but because the behavior of our men over-
seas is another aspect, and weapon, of the kind of total war
we fought in Korea and may have to fight elsewhere.

When two cultures which are unprepared even to meet
actually collide, as the Americans collided with the "gooks,"
there are bound to be sparks. And some of the sparks will
burn. Late in the war, as the GIs increased their respect for
the ROKs as soldiers, the term "gook" began to fade out of
use. But the damage to Korean sensitivity had been done. It
does not help the situation to say, as a rationalization, that
only a few of the men were at f ault This was true. But the
Koreans could not be blamed if they did not often notice the
better-behaved men, and could only generalize from the few
who hurt them deeply. Neither does it help to say, as a
defense, that, after all, the men did not ask to go to Korea but
were sent there. The point is that many of them had simply
not learned how to behave away from home. Somewhere

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 147

along the line the U.S. has failed to prepare its soldiers to fill
the nation's present desperate need especially in anti-
Western Asia for warriors who are also traveling salesmen.

The Germans and the Japanese behaved far worse than
our soldiers when they left home. But theirs was, as we have
said, an arrogant mission of racialist expansion. No one was
surprised when they went wild. The American mission is to
help hold together the free world with the strength of our
character, as well as with our guns. It will be a most difficult
task if we do not show character.

**We were under Japanese rule for nearly forty years,** said
Lee Jong Hee, "and we learned not to show our feelings. We
did not dare. We held our fears only in our hearts. Now, if a
GI does something unthinking, we say, *Okay, okay* He's
here to help us.* But the hurt feeling accumulates inside.'*

I was standing in the market at Yong Dung Po one day
when I noticed a Korean mother waiting while her child ac-
cepted a piece of candy from a soldier. "Americans are very
kind,** she volunteered to my interpreter. Tliey always stop
to smile at our children.**

With the help of their candy and rations of chewing gum,
American soldiers have endeared themselves to the children
of every country to which they have ever been sent. In Korea
enlisted men, entirely on their own initiative and financed
from their own pay, set up homes for literally thousands of
war orphans. Every city in South Korea had a booming side*
walk shoeshine industry, simply because when a small boy
with a dirty face and ragged clothing came along with his
box of polish and a shy smile, few soldiers could resist stop-
ping, whether their boots needed shining or not The children
reciprocated. Some of their best shines they gave away for
nothing. And dirty though they usually were, they were not

148

considered "gooks." They were not even Koreans. They were

just kids.

It is an enlightening commentary on the social maturity
of America that when its soldiers find themselves in a strange
country, which is full of queer-looking and sometimes ex-
asperating people, who speak an unintelligible language, with
whom the soldier can find no sense of kinship and to whom he
can on occasion even be cruel, he turns instinctively to the
children, and, by making an immediate and firm alliance with
them, seems to say that he wants to maintain at least a junior
membership in the human race.

X

ACCORDING TO the Chinese lunar calendar, spring in
China begins on February 5. 1 happened to be on the Chinese
island of Formosa for the beginning of spring 195S, and there
the day brought more than the usual sight of February
morning glories, the harvest of leafy Taiwan tobacco, and
the transplanting of delicate rice seedlings in tie hundreds
of shimmering paddies. President Eisenhower had just an-
nounced that the U.S. Seventh Fleet would no longer at-
tempt to keep the Nationalist Chinese penned up on their
redoubt. They were free to attack tKe mainland whenever

150

they wanted to. (The fleet would continue to protect For-
mosa from Communist attack, a fact which was omitted from
the early news broadcasts, the omission of which caused a
good deal of consternation on the island at the time. The
Americans stationed there knew that without the U.S. fleet to
shield the place against the Reds, the Communists might try
to take it, and could probably succeed. For Formosa has a
tiny navy. Chiang Kai-shek still remembers that his original
navy turned out to be full of traitors, and he lost so many
ships when their officers surrendered to the Reds that he has
had trouble rebuilding his fleet. ) What Eisenhower had done
was to rescind the order which President Truman had given
the fleet, in an effort at the time to localize the war in Korea
and so avoid an additional imbroglio with the Chinese main-
land. The Nationalist Chinese thought it was a wonderful
way to start spring.

From one end of the mountainous island to the other,
Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's troops rose early in their
barracks and marched through the chilly February fog to
their training grounds. Just as they had for three restless
years, the soldiers toned their hardened muscles with rigor-
ous calisthenics, charged fanatically across rice paddies and
cane fields in mock attacks, improved their nerves by tossing
live grenades back and forth to each other and by dividing
up into opposing forces for practice and attacking one an-
other's positions with live mortar and machine-gun fire. The
exercises were not new the men had gone through them
many times but their spirit had reached a new high. With
Eisenhower's announcement that they would no longer be
held back, the men lit into their training with a second wind
and with the soldier's understanding that it might now make
some sense.

The excitement was not confined to the soldiers, most of

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 151

whom are mainlanders who left their families behind when
their homes fell and are now determined, after three long,
frustrating years, to return to them. Even the Taiwanese
farmers, whose families have been on the island for genera-
tions and no longer have strong ties on the mainland, rose
voluntarily in meetings to proclaim their own support for an
early recapture of their homeland. And on school black-
boards, children practiced writing Chinese characters with
these words: "Little friends of Free China are the most fortu-
nate little friends. Get ready to counterattack the mainland/*

Taiwan is a garden spot (Portuguese sailors called it "For-
mosa," or "Beautiful Island"), lush with bananas, pineapple,
tea, and rice. Its tropical climate and quiet isolation have
attracted restless mainlanders to its shores for centuries. But
none of the approximately 2,000,000 Chinese, who had re-
treated there from the Reds three years before, forgets for
one moment that his exile is only temporary. Most of them
have good reason for wanting to return home as soon as
possible. A young Chinese Air Force major explained it to
me this way: "I had to leave my family behind when we
bugged out. Not long ago I heard my father had died under
mysterious circumstances. I have three brothers there. One is
a doctor; one is a lawyer; and one is an engineer. All were
prosperous when the Communists first came. And yet my
mother had to write to me for enough money to bury my
father. Something awful has happened there. We must go
back"

Though Eisenhower's statement cleared the air and
charged it with a new determination, it did not automatically
alter a basic military fact: the Chinese Nationalists are not
yet ready to go bade en masse. They have the courage and
the wilL But they lack the equipment to launch such a tre-
mendous military operation across one hundred miles of

152

water, against a mainland force which far outnumbers them.
And it is doubtful if they would be a serious match for Mao's
huge forces, even if they were fully equipped.

Here is what they can do: they can continue to send hit-
and-run nuisance raids against Communist positions on the
opposite coast; they can continue to train and send over guer-
rilla leaders to move inland and set up cells of opposition for
the day when Chiang may be strong enough, through outside
support, to make an all-out attack; they can continue to
bring back prisoners in an effort to add to their information
on mainland installations and to undermine morale among
the Red units facing them. The Nationalists were doing all
this even under Truman's neutralization order (by operating
not from the island of Taiwan, which the order covered, but
from their offshore bases in the Pescadores and Quemoy).

The immediate effect of Eisenhower's announcement was
twofold: (1) it allowed Chiang to operate directly from his
Taiwan bases, thus making it possible for him to mount
larger raids involving more men. (This would cause Mao to
pin down an increasing number of Red troops on the main-
land coast to meet such a threat.) And (2) the order con-
verted Chiang's forces overnight from a useless, isolated
army, hamstrung by public proclamation, into at least a
psychological weapon. Even if Chiang's forces were not yet
ready to launch an all-out attack on the mainland (which the
enemy surely knew from his own intelligence), at least the
enemy knew as a result that it might now be only a matter of
time. He could no longer assume anything. He would have to
start guessing. There was evidence before I left Formosa that
Mao was guessing hard. Nationalist officers reported that
Communist troops were known to have been reshuffled along
the coast The enemy was already feeling the psychological
effect; he was nervous.

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 153

The only real answer to whether a force can or cannot
fight is to turn it loose and find out Chiang's forces are not
yet equipped to the critical point where they can be turned
completely loose. Even as a defensive force, to sit tight and
guard Formosa, they are far from prepared. And they are the
first to admit it. But they lack nothing which additional sup-
plies and training would not correct. They need landing craft,
communications equipment, ammunition supplies, better
planes, standardized weapons all of which must come from
the U.S. They have the men, the morale, and the motive for
attack. It is now up to the U.S., having sharpened their will,
to hand them the sharp bayonets and the sharp-nosed bullets
to do the job. Their assets are many:

They have a tightly trained army of hard, well-fed, spar-
tanlike soldiers. It is not as large as many of its fans have
claimed. Its strength of effective troops organized into units
for deployment in combat amounts to ten "armies,** each of
which numbers about 20,000 men the average size of a U.S.
division. Neither is it as old as some of its critics have
claimed. Many of its soldiers who fought on the mainland
were very young, and their average age today is about
twenty-seven. Nearly all of them had combat experience on
the mainland and the criticism that Chiang's army was and
still is a defeated army can be answered by the fact that
these particular men are the cream of the crop, who did not
defect but who cared enough about freedom and their loyalty
to Chiang to follow him to Taiwan and start all over again*
Their three years of intensive training have welded them
tightly together.

One of the Nationalist Army s greatest assets is its leader:
General Sun Ld-jen^ a graying but vigorous fighting man of
fifty-two who studied at Purdue University and V.M.L in the
U.S., and speaks fluent English. Sun commanded an army on

154

the mainland and he is almost solely responsible for the in-
creasing stamina and skill of Chiang's present ground force.
A superb field soldier, Sun spends seven days a week at his
job. His pride and joy is the officers' academy at Fengshan,
situated on a huge sunlit plateau near the southern tip of the
island. He knows that any army depends heavily on the
strength and skill of its junior officers, and nearly every Sun-
day finds hi leaving his office to stride across the field in
his high cavalry boots, personalty checking on their training.
Most of the young candidates for commissions come to Feng-
shan as a result of competitive examinations in the ranks, and
these are the cream of his noncoms and enlisted men. For
two and a half years (the course is now being lengthened
to four, as at West Point) the men concentrate on basic train-
ing, rugged calisthenics to harden their bodies, and, finally,
specialized training in artillery, bridge building, infantry
tactics, horsemanship, signaling. As they train, General Sun
walks through the ranks, stopping here and there to scold a
mortar crew for not digging its piece in properly, feels the
muscles of a young cadet to check on his physique (he is an
excellent athlete and onetime basketball star himself), and
often gets down on the ground beside a rifleman to correct
his sighting and aiming technique. He is a strict disciplinarian
and a hard-driving soldier. But he also has a good sense of
humor. Once, while escorting a visiting American general on
an inspection of one of his units, Sun stopped before one
soldier and proudly told the visitor that this man was one of
several thousand Taiwanese boys who have been integrated
into the Chinese army. The American officer asked how the
Taiwan boy liked it. With dozens of accompanying officers
looking on, General Sun dutifully interpreted the question to
file nervous soldier and then turned to give the American his

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 155

answer. "He likes it," he laughed, <c What did you think he'd
say?"

Sun's sense of humor comes in handy, for he faces some
tremendous problems. Though he is commander-in-chief of
the Chinese anny, he can give few orders. His army is
broken up among several area commanders, each of whom
is responsible to a higher authority than Sun. His duties are
largely confined to training. Some of his units are outfitted
with Belgian Mausers, others with U.S. Springfields, still
others with Enfields. He has some artillery, but it would have
to be increased with extra equipment to support a permanent
landing of any great size. And he lacks the field telephones
and radios needed to co-ordinate the fire of the guns with the
movement of his troops. But though supply is normally the
direct problem of the commander-in-chief, Sun has little
control over his own logistics. That job is given to the Com-
bined Service Forces, under another set of generals. He also
has no armor under his command. AH the Chinese tanks-
many of which are small, obsolescent M-IVs are concen-
trated in a separate force, under the command of one of
Chiang's sons, General Chiang Wego. (His Chinese name is
Wei-kuo; he changed it after military school in Germany.)
Wego is a tough, skillful soldier who served as a private in
the German army and has come up the hard way in the
Chinese forces. His father makes a point of giving him no
favors he does not deserve or work for. But this does not help
Sun, who were he to go ashore tomorrow would first have
to go through ohfl--nnf>ts to get the necessary supplies and
ammo from one general, the necessary tank support from
another, and would then have to find out, probably from the
Generalissimo himself, just what authority he would have
with his own separate division commanders to get the show

156

on the road. The confusion that would result is enough to
make the American military advisers shudder.

One of the most colorful figures on the island is the com-
mander of the Chinese Air Force, General ("Tiger**) Wang
Shu-ming. A squat, husky fighter of forty-nine, with a smile
that wrinkles his entire face and an inner fiber as tough as
the struts on one of his planes, Tiger has been flying since he
was twenty. He was in the first class to graduate from Wham-
poa Military Academy, which was commanded at the time by
a rising general named Chiang Kai-shek. When Dr. Sun
Yat-sen started the first flying school at Canton, the Tiger was
among the first ten cadets to join up. Later, because the
Chinese Republic was running low on fuel and planes, he
was sent to Russia to continue his training. He did not think
much of Russian pilots (he says they were sloppy and not so
brave as foolhardy) and when he returned to Russia in 1937
to purchase Russian planes for the Chinese to use against
Japan, his opinion of Red aviation fell even lower: the plane
he was given to fly home just barely got him there. Most of
the others were equally defective. He also remembers that the
Russians changed their minds and terms so often that he was
not at all surprised by the Red tactics at Panmunjom. His
memory of the intimidation and fear he saw among the Rus-
sians still haunts Trim, and it explains a good deal about his
anti-Communist zeal today.

Later he went to Italy to learn bombing techniques (a
superior officer thought the Italians had made some nice pat-
terns against the Ethiopians) and came home to command a
flying school* While he ran the school with one hand he took
over a Chinese air force with the other. When General Claire
Chennault arrived in China with his American Volunteer
Group, Wang was soon tapped to be his chief of staff, and it
was while he worked with Chennault's Trying Tigers'* that

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 157

Tiger Wang picked up the nickname he has been known by
ever since. Then, when General Curtis LeMay took his
bombers to China, the Tiger was given the job of building
the airfields for him. He did such a good job of organizing an
aircraft warning system on the side that he was soon given
the job of organizing a similar system for all of Chfna.

I was chatting with him one day across his desk, which has
a huge statue of Bismarck in one corner, when Air Force
Colonel Ed Rector, who had worked with Wang in the war
and is now his U.S. military adviser, started reminiscing about
the old days and remarked that the Tiger s warning system
against Japanese air attacks was the most effective the U.S-
had ever seen. ~We knew when the Japanese planes were
coming almost as soon as they'd taken off/* Rector remarked.

"Hell," Wang laughed loudly, *1 had two Japs working for
me!"

Outside observers had considered Wang the best candi-
date for boss of the Chinese Air Force long before he got the
job. He was its deputy commander beginning in 1946, but
he did not get the top appointment because of high-level
politics among the generals until 1952. When the news o
his promotion came the Tiger jumped impetuously into his
own B-25 and spent two hours alone in the air, just flying
around for the heck of it. It was his last carefree gesture.

When the news of Eisenhower's order came, Tiger, like
General Sun, had plenty of problems on his hands. He had
a group of pilots carefully hand-picked and tutored in Eng-
lishenrolled in U.S. flying schools to learn how to fly jets.
He had some maintenance men among them to learn the
intricacies of jet repair. And his engineers, with U.S. in-
structors standing by, were busy building airfields which
would have strips long enough to handle the new planes
when they arrived. The Tiger was happy about all that But

158

even with the new planes he still had a lot more experienced
and battle-wise pilots on his rosters than he had cockpits to
put them in. And the planes he had F-51s, some newly
arrived F-47s, and a few light bombers were hardly a match
for the Red Air Force. If he did not get more planes soon, his
pilots would become rusty from lack of flying time. And
if they did not keep up their flying time, how could they
adequately support the ground troops if and when the time
came?

Despite these problems the morale of the Chinese Air
Force was high. It was so high in fact that the Tiger had had
to crack down a little. His men were getting too cocky, and
they were somewhat spoiled. Before Wang assumed com-
mand, the air force had taken it easy on dishing out punish-
ment and demerits presumably on the theory that it might
someday need all the pilots it could get and that a pilot who
received a demerit just might get sore and defect to the
Communists. The Tiger changed all that Once, on an inspec-
tion trip, he was in a hurry to get to a remote base and asked
one of his local commanders in the field to provide hfm with
a car. He had ridden about halfway to his destination, along
a lonely road, when the car suddenly broke down. For two
hours the Tiger sat on the fender, watching water buffalo
lumber by and cursing the memory of the commander who
had loaned him the car. Finally, when he got back, his first
act was to relieve the unfortunate colonel not because Wang
had been personally inconvenienced, but because the colonel
had been grossly inefficient. T3e knew that there is not a car
on Taiwan you can trust," said the general later. "So he
should have sent a standby car to follow me. I don't want a
man commanding my planes who does not think of things
like that."

I was never able to find out what Wang, the perfectionist,

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 159

did about a report which came to his desk some time later.
Two planes had collided on a training flight, and one pilot
had plunged to his death. The officer in command of the
flight, trying to write an accident report which would get
himself off the hook, put it this way: "Pilot Lu of the acci-
dent aircraft was dead. . . . He was relieved of his responsi-
bility."

Though Pilot Lu, being dead, was relieved of his responsi-
bility for the defense of Formosa and the attack on the main-
land, it is certain that no one who is alive and working for
the Nationalist cause is ever allowed for a moment to forget
his own. The man who probably reads more reports and
knows more than anyone else on the island about responsi-
bility is the Generalissimo's eldest son, General Chiang
Ching-kuo. As head of the Political Department of the Minis-
try of National Defense, Ching-kuo is one of the most power-
ful men in the government And he got there, say most
observers, not because he is the Gimo's son, but because he
is a strong, dedicated, and expert boss in his own right His
tentacles run through the entire military structure from the
highest command to the smallest unit, and his own responsi-
bilities are immense: he is responsible for all special service
and entertainment functions in the military; his department
runs the physical training program and promotes all or-
ganized athletic events; the chaplains are responsible to his
office, as are the Chinese version of the Red Cross and the
Veterans Administration; the task of wiping out illiteracy
and educating the soldiers, sailors, and airmen in Chinese
history, language, and ethics is his; he supervises the psycho-
logical warfare program waged against the mainland; he
handles ticklish jobs of intelligence, counterintelligence, and
counterespionage with all the frills of spies, counterspies,

160

and investigations which these entaiL He is in charge of all
home-front propaganda and the heavy barrage of political
indoctrination which is constantly drummed into tie mili-
tary in daily lectures. And as the inspector general of the
entire military system, he has teams planted in the navy, the
army, and the air force who report directly to him. If there
is any question about the disloyalty or defection of anyone
on Taiwan, from a private to a full general, Ching-kuo is the
first to know of it. He is the commissar general of Free China.

Looking at all this power, a number of foreigners on Tai-
wan have concluded that Ching-kuo is the next in line for
his father's job. But others, who know Ching-kuo well, say
this is not so, that he has no personal ambitions and that he
is merely filling the job because someone has to do it and
he is the best man fitted by temperament and experience to
bring it off. The genera], who is forty-eight and surprisingly
warm and affable for one who wields so much cold power,
prepared for his role by studying the political commissar
system in Russia. He speaks Russian, is married *o a Rus-
sian, and his children look more Russian than Chinese. With
this in mind, some American advisers look askance at his
organization, feeling that it concentrates too much power
into political channels a Russian failing and that Ching-
kuo's political structure in the military might one day prove
just as disastrous to the Chinese generals as it has to many
Russian generals who have found the political commissars
running their battles for them.

In the face of American criticism, Ching-kuo has backed
down a little. He no longer insists that all orders put out by
mffiitaiy commanders have to be countersigned by his politi-
cal officers. He has agreed to cut down on political indoc-
trination classes until they take up only ten per cent of the
training schedule thus giving the men more time to learn

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 161

how to fight. And he claims to have no interest in controlling
the tactical decisions of the military commanders. His only
interest, he says, is in seeing that his father's army does not
crumble this time for lack of loyalty or political stability, as
it did on the mainland. And there he has a point The Chi-
nese armies were at their best and most victorious, he points
out, from 1924 to 1945, and were at their worst from 1946
to 1950. Well, he adds, they had political officers from 1924
to 1945, and they did not have political officers from 1946
to 1950. As logic, that's hard to beat It is Ching-kuo's hope
and determination that when the soldiers go back this time
they will know every one of them what they are fighting
for and why. And he also hopes to know, before they go,
what the soldiers every one of them are thinking. As the
pace picked up after the deneutralization order, the stack of
dossiers got thicker on the general's desk and the three
phones next to them rang a little oftener than usual

While Chiang Ching-fcuo is busy in his tiny office, tight-
ening the reins of loyalty and stamping his personal chop on
the thousands of reports concerning indoctrination, military
fitness, and Communist intelligence, his two young sons
Hsiao-wu, seven, and Hsiao-yang, four are more often than
not up at their grandfather's house, playing with their cow-
boy pistols, wearing their Chinese-made Hopalong Cassidy
uniforms, and taking turns using the Generalissimo's aged
but patient black spaniel for a horse. They are the apples of
the Gimo's eye, and after his afternoon nap he often walks
into the garden to play with them before going back to his
work.

When I was there, Madame Chiang Kai-shek was still in
the U.S. undergoing medical treatment, and without her the
Generalissimo's personal life was a lonely ona But it was as
full and busy, at sixty-seven, as it ever was. He rises at dawn,

162

does some setting-up exercises to keep himself trim, and then
after a brief prayer in his chapel sits down to a simple
breakfast of fruit. After breakfast his secretary reads him the
day's news and by nine he is on his way to his office on the
second floor of the huge red brick Ministry of National
Defense building in Taipeh. There, until noon, he meets
with from twenty to fifty visitors. He does not spare himself.
He goes home for lunch and after a short nap spends the
rest of the afternoon receiving callers and having conferences
at his home. In the evening he stops for tea and a brief walk
and then, just before dinner, he retires again to his chapel
for prayer. After dinner, which he often eats alone when
Madame is away, he usually works on his copious diary. Be-
fore retiring at eleven he sometimes has American and
Chinese newsreels run off for him on his private projector.
( Several times a month his young grandchildren take over
the projector to watch their favorite cowboy movies.)

At his office one morning while I was present, the Gener-
alissimo had a brief visit from an American professor, in town
to do an educational survey, talked with the publisher of a
Chinese magazine about his editorial policy, and interviewed
several officers who were about to be promoted, in order to
assure himself of their personal loyalty and integrity. It is
one of the strengths and weaknesses of the Generalissimo's
government that he refuses to delegate such chores to other
officials. Every officer, for example, of regimental rank in the
army, or of group rank in the air force, must personally be
interviewed by the Generalissimo before he can be promoted
in rank or shifted in his job. This might seem to be a tre-
mendous waste of the Gimo's time, and a tedious chore that
could just as well be handled by his army and air force com-
manders. But Chiang has a good reason for it: he has had
such bitter experience with disloyal or badly placed official.

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 163

who have let him down in the past, that he now feels it was
his own fault for not having paid closer attention to them.
He seems to think that once he has seen them and looked
them in the eye and they have looked him in the eye they
will be his followers forever. Perhaps he is right.

I also happened to be present one morning when two
dozen young air force officers were brought in to say good-by
before journeying to the U.S. to study. They were mostly
lieutenants, captains, and majors. Hey had their orders.
They had learned their English lessons, so as to be able to
study. And presumably they had all been hand-picked and
sorted until they were above reproach. But still the Gener-
alissimo wanted to see them. They lined up neatly in two files
and practiced their saluting and bowing. They were nervous
and a little embarrassed. Several of them smiled at me as if I
might find the rite rather amusing. Suddenly the door opened
and an aide barked an order. To a man, they sprang to
ramrod attention and bowed toward the door as the Gen-
eralissimo walked in, slowly and with a slight stoop. He had
a sheet of paper in his hands and after looking the group
over he began to walk down the row, calling the roll of then-
names. Each man as he answered thrust out his chin, stuck
his fist into the air in salute, and looked right into the Gimo's
piercing eyes. I have never seen such fire or devotion as in
those two dozen pairs of eyes. When the Gimo had read the
entire rofl, and personalty checked off each man's name, he
stood the men at ease and talked to them for about five
minutes. He told them he was proud to send them to
America, that he expected each of them to work hard, to set
a good example to the Americans they met, and to come
home prepared to add substantially to fie plans for counter-
attacking the mainland. He looked them over again, nodded,
and went back to his desk as they jumped once more to

164

respectful attention. The officers filed out. They were prob-
ably dedicated enough when they came, or they would not
have been chosen. However, I have no doubt but what they
were one hundred per cent more dedicated when they left

For all his faults of leadership his overcentralization of
power, for example, and his tendency to control the balance
by playing his generals against one another and making
them scramble for supplies and even for tanks Chiang Kai-
shek is still the heart and soul of the Nationalist movement.
His greatest strength and his greatest weakness is that
there is no one else around who can match him, or could
easily replace him.

But there is nothing of the 1984 Big Brother or dictator-
god about him. Two huge statues of the Generalissimo were
erected not long ago in Taipeh, the capital city. It looked
for a time as if there might be a scramble on to see how
many statues his admiring underlings could erect. But the
Gimo stepped in just as the second one was finished and put a
stop to it "We must remember,"' he warned later, in a mes-
sage to the nation, "that, although we are today enjoying
temporary peace in Taiwan, we must not allow ourselves to
Eve in self-complacency/* Then he outlined the job ahead:
"The social and cultural reform movement is the founda-
tion to the coming counteroffensive. In the social field, every-
body must love his own people and render service to others.
In the cultural field, everyone must have a sense of propriety
and righteousness. . . . We must be inspired by a new
spirit. . . . It does not mean that we must introduce changes
all the time and plan new and strange devices. It does mean
that we have to discard what is out of date for what is new
and replace what is corrupt and outmoded with better
things/*

Perhaps nowhere else has this new spirit been put to better

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 165

use than in the land reform movement Had the Generalis-
simo been as successful in this field on the mainland as he has
been on Taiwan, it is possible he could have held China
against the Reds. For it was on the dissatisfaction of the
peasants and the small farmers that the Communists capi-
talized most. Even now, regardless of how big an army the
Nationalists storm the mainland with, the odds will be
against them unless they take something else along too: a
new deal, as it were, for the masses of people there, who
were downtrodden under the old landlords and are even
more downtrodden today under the Red communizers. The
strongest weapon Chiang now has for recovery of the main-
land is not his hardened army or his eager air force, or even
his small corps of 14,000 hard-bitten Chinese Marines. It is
the set of social reforms which he has worked out on Taiwan
and which he now hopes to transplant, like a bed of tested
rice seedlings, to the larger paddy fields of China.

For nineteen generations the family of Wong Shen has
lived on the island of Taiwan. His ancestors went there to
escape the unrest of seventeenth-century China, They found
peace, but aside from that life seemed as hard, and as fruit-
less, as it had on the mainland. The Wongs started out as
farm hands, working for their food and shelter on the farms
of others. They were still working as farm hands until some
thirty years ago, when Wong Shen moved with his father
to a farm near Taichung and the family rose a notch
to become tenants. It was only a notch, however. Hie Japa-
nese, who won Taiwan in 1895 as booty from the Sino-
Japanese War, occupied the island. They stipulated the
crops, collected the harvests, and appointed afl the officials
with whom Wong Shen had to deaL And from his crop of
rice Wong Shen had to give his landlord half (and sometimes

166

more) in rent It left hi little to eat, and even less to sell in
exchange for clothes and other necessities of life. Life was
peaceful, but it was not kind. Wong Shen's wife, Li-mei, often
prayed before the household shrine of Kwan Yin, the goddess
of mercy. But not knowing of a better life, she usually
thanked Kwan Yin for what little they had.

Then one day World War II ended, the defeated Japanese
departed, and the first officials came from Chiang Kai-shek's
headquarters on the mainland to take Taiwan back into the
fold as a province of China. They got off to a very bad start,
and the Taiwanese had good reason to wish sometimes that
the Japanese would come back. The Chinese soldiers who
came to liberate them were brutal and overbearing. They
took what food they wanted and slapped down whoever got
in their way. And the first governor Chiang sent over, a man
named Chen Yi, was as tyrannical as any old China had ever
known. When the young Taiwanese dared to organize in an
effort to protect their homes from the rowdy Chinese soldiers,
Chen Yi ordered five thousand of them rounded up and shot.
If this was the new democratic government o Chiang Zai-
shek, Taiwan wanted none of it.

Fortunately for Taiwan and for Chiang Zai-shek Chen Yi
did not last. He was sent back to the mainland, where he
later began to traffic with the rampaging Communists and
was finally ordered executed by Chiang. In a moment of
poetic justice the execution was carried out in Taipeh, so
that the Taiwanese might know of their tyrant's fate.

Then, having learned his lesson, Chiang began to provide
Taiwan with increasingly better government. Wei Tao-ming
was sent direct from Washington to take over from Chen Yi
and repair the damage. His first move was to employ some
Taiwanese in the provincial government. Then in 1949 Tai-
wan got its first real Chinese friend in the person of Chen

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 167

Cheng, a devoted disciple of Chiang's who had started life as
a lowly farm boy and risen through the ranks to become a
top general, Minister of War, and finally chief of Chiang's
general staff.

One of Chen's first goals as governor was to ease the lot
of the fanners. He knew they were the backbone of the
economy, and from the Communist revolution on the main-
land he had learned that no government could stand against
the inroads of Communism unless it lightened the burdens of
debt, taxes, and misery which the farmers had been made to
carry. Before his year's term was out, Chen had designed and
pushed through the legislature a rent-reduction policy which
lowered the rent any tenant paid for his land to 37.5 per cent
of the value of his main crop, instead of the usual half or
more, which they had paid before.

In 1951 Chiang made Chen's provincial policy the official
law of the land and the farmers were jubilant Since then tie
government has added two more features to the land reform
programone providing for the sale of government-owned
land to the farmers at a nominal price (two and a half times
the value of one year's crop, payable over a ten-year period);
and another which limits the amount of land that any ab-
sentee landlord can own-ihus freeing another 440,000 acres
for the small farmer. Wily old Chen Cheng, now Premier of
the Nationalist Government, has followed through on every
step. The Legislative Yuan, which had to pass the bill limiting
landlords* holdings, was heavily represented by the very
landlords who would be losing the most land. A number of
them muttered their opposition to the plan. Though ailing
he cannot drink and smokes sparingly Chen invited groups
of legislators to his home for dinner. Raising his glass of rice
wine in a token toast, he smilingly persuaded them that by
letting their tenants make more profit ajod eventually buy

168

up the land, the landlords would have the extra capital to
invest in industry, and thus get in on the ground floor of
Taiwan's expanding economy and at the same time help make
Taiwan industrially self-sufficient. The argument worked and
the bill passed.

"Chen is the strength of Asia," said Dr. Hubert Schenck,
chief of the MSA mission in Taiwan. "The simple farm boy
and the experienced soldier, he is one of the few men here
who understands free enterprise, the common man's prob-
lems, the value of education and the strength of the free
labor movement. Everything we talk about and stand for in
the U.S., he understands without being told."

"All of us have learned our bitter lesson from our failure
on the mainland," says Chen, tugging gracefully at the khaki
shirt which shows under his simple black uniform. "And we
are all ready to start over again."

Chen Cheng's successor as governor was the plucky, hard-
working little ex-mayor of Shanghai, K. C. Wu. A man of
imagination and showmanship who went to Grinnell and
Princeton in the twenties and was also mayor of Hankow and
Chungking before he took over at Shanghai, Wu went to
work, reorganizing the schools, shifting the island's language
and culture back from Japanese to Chinese, and continuing
the job of making Taiwan a model for the kind of government
the Nationalists hope to take back with them to the main-
land. To find out what the people needed, Wu made constant
inspection trips to remote villages and islands, bucking up
the local government and flying back to his office in Taipeh
with a briefcase full of new ideas. As the farmers' lot became
better, he turned his attention to the 100,000 fishermen along
Formosa's shores. When a typhoon wrecked many of the
fishing villages, K.C. went down to find out what had hap-
pened to the weather-warning system and to set about im-

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 169

proving it. Then he instituted an insurance fund to Help
them over their losses, buy new junks, and improve their
harbors.

The cost of creating a new government, instituting reforms,
and at the same time maintaining a huge defense budget for
the training and support of an army, a navy, and an air force
has put a severe strain on the Nationalist economy. Taxes
were already so high that they could not very well be raised
any further. But it was not so much a problem of raising taxes
as it was of collecting them. The fanners, whose land and
animals and crops could be easily seen and taxed, had tradi-
tionally carried the burden of taxes in riKma And tie
merchants had always been notoriously successful at doeZging
their taxes either by juggling their books or by hiding
their cash. So Wu thought up another gimmick to settle that
problem. He made the merchants give receipts for all pur-
chases over ten dollars Taiwan (about seventy-five cents
U.S. ) . He had the government print the receipts with a num-
ber on each one to make them easier to keep track of. Then,
to force the merchants to give the receipts ( and thus provide
the government with a better check on their income for tax
purposes) he told the customers that they ware lottery
tickets. Every month, now, the provincial government gives
fifty thousand dollars Taiwan to the holder of the lucky re-
ceipts, with smaller prizes going to lesser numbers. No cus-
tomer in his right mind will make a purchase these days
without demanding a receipt, and Wu was able to collect so
many taxes from the once clever merchants that he thought
he could get by without having to increase taxes at alL

The leading brands of cigarettes on sale in Taiwan these
days are labeled TParadise" and **New Paradise." For all its
tropical fruits and bubbling eptTwsiasnij. Taiwan is not, in any

170

real sense of the word, a paradise. There is, for example, a
serious lack of raw materials for industry. And much of the
industry which does exist on the island is so handicapped by
lack of proper machinery and cheap materials that it is ineffi-
cient Taiwan can never hope to be entirely self-sufficient
But in the short space of three years, under pressure of
imminent attack from the mainland, and against awesome
odds, Taiwan changed tremendously. Some of the signs of
the changing times are most impressive:

The 1952 rice crop was 1,700,000 metric tons far more
than the Japanese, with all their forceful persuasion, were
ever able to glean from Taiwan's paddies.

Nearly every farm today has a new building, a new tile
roof to replace the dirty straw, three or four more pigs, more
and better food in the larder, and new and warmer clothes in
the wardrobe. Farmer Wong Shen was able to save enough
money to send his fourth son to high school ( an impossibility
under the previous high rent) . And his third son could afford
a wedding so much finer than he would have had in former
years that he was able to persuade a girl from a healthier and
better-educated farm family to marry "him. Some of the
neighbors smile and say that Sze-chnan, a pretty girl of
twenty-four who also brought along a sewing machine when
she married into the family, is Wong Shen's 37.5 daughter-
in-law which is a local joke, meaning that she can be
directly attributed to the reduction of land rent to but 37.5
per cent of the tobacco and rice Wong grows.

Though most of these impressive gains are the result of
Lard work and idealistic determination on the part of the
Chinese, many of them have been made possible or at least
easier with U.S. aid, EGA and MSA have, among other
things provided for barracks, hangars, fuel facilities, medical
equipment, ordnance shops, and the material for military

SUBSTTTUTE FOR VICTORY 171

uniforms and boots. They have helped repair school build-
ings and waterworks, helped build bridges and highways and
irrigation projects, expanded the production and transmission
of electric power, increased the fertilizer production, helped
the Chinese to explore for minerals, streamline their textile
production, and improve their breed of pigs. By 1957, it is
hoped, the economy wiH be strong enough and the factories,
farms, and fields we are now developing so much more pro-
ductive that Taiwan can cany on by itself.

Perhaps the best thing to come out of the entire experi-
ment is a small organisation known as JCRR (Joint Commis-
sion on Rural Reconstruction). Set up first on the mainland,
JCRR consists of two American farm experts, appointed by
the President of the U.S., and two Chinese farm experts, ap-
pointed by President Chiang Kai-shek. Its fifth member and
chairman is a wise old philosopher and educator named
Chiang Monlin. Chiang (no kin) first became interested in
land reform on the mainland, where he was president of the
Chinese Red Cross, chancellor of Peking University, secre-
tary general of the Executive Yuan, and a long-time friend
and associate of modem China's founder, Sun Yat-sen. In his
first mainland experience with land reform, Chiang Monlin
carried a gun to protect himself from the irate landlords.
When another member of the crusading group was slain,
Chiang and his friends prudently decided China was not
ready for this kind of thing, and the movement broke up.
Now, at last, on Taiwan, he has seen his early ideas bear fruit
Today JCRR is a household word and nearly every farm-
house on Taiwan has its rooms decorously papered with the
posters, fertilizer-mixing charts, and farm newspapers which
are provided by the commission.

JCRR is a model of what all international aid organizations
ought to be. The original money was U.S., but instead of

172

moving in and spending U.S. dollars lavishly to buy up an
economy as similar projects have done JCKR moved slowly.
Experienced field workers tour the farms looking for trouble
spots. When they find a problem that needs solving they wait
until a local sponsor comes forward to guarantee the project.
It may be the sugar company, looking for a better way to ir-
rigate cane, or a farmers* association which needs fertilizer to
help increase its yield. As soon as JCRR is convinced that the
project is sound and for the farmers 9 best interests, it makes a
loan.

The sponsor must put up some of the money; JCRR never
puts up all. Then, when the project begins to pay off, in bet-
ter crops, fatter hogs, additional irrigation water, or a disease-
free tobacco plant, the sponsor sees to it that JCRR gets its
loan back and the commission looks around for another proj-
ect to work on. JCRR has practically rebuilt the agricultural
economy of Taiwan at a cost of but ten million dollars U.S.
But only a half -million of that has actually come from the
American taxpayer. The rest represents counterpart funds-
Taiwanese dollars resulting from the profits and gains
achieved in the program. One year's rice crop alone is worth
the cost of the entire program. Never in the history of Ameri-
can aid, perhaps, has so much been done for so little. And the
beauty of it is that the program is, as the title indicates, a
joint effort. No move is ever made unless the Americans and
Chinese on the commission all agree that it is sound. The
fanners know there is American money in the program, and
they are grateful. But the Americans do not hog the show or
the credit Thus the Chinese government is allowed to gain
face and prestige in the eyes of the Taiwanese and as every-
one hopes in the eyes of the farmers on the mainland.

For the only hope for Free China is that if and when men
like Sun Li-jen, Tiger Wang, and Chiang Wego land on the

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 173

mainland with their guns, planes, and tanks there will be men
like Chiang Monlin and Chen Cheng not far behind with
their ideas. The two teams belong together. Without the re-
forms worked out on Taiwan the military will have little to
offer China but a bloody battle. Reports filtering out of China
through Hong Kong from time to time indicate that the people
on the mainland have learned of the Nationalists* work on
Taiwan of their elections and land reforms and of the new
roofs and the 37.5 wives. Chiang has a small army, as armies
go. But if he can one day land enough of it at one time to
establish a bridgehead, and then proceed to transplant the
government he has tested on Taiwan, it is possible that the
enslaved population of China will rise to help him. If they
do, then China will once again be free.

When I last visited him, old farmer Wong Shen looked
around at his farmhousewhich his landlord still owned
and at the fields he had not yet been able to buy up. He
figured that in another five or six good years he would be able
to own them all. According to the law, he will have ten years
in which to pay for them. But he is willing because he is
excited now to pay for them sooner than that, even at a
higher price, and thus consolidate his gains. He is not im-
patient, but with the adventure of freedom at last in sight, he
would rather suffer no long delay. Trying to explain to me
why he felt this way, he quoted an old Chinese proverb: If
the night is long, there are too many dreams."

On the tyrannized mainland of China these days, the
nights are long with waiting and the nightmares are endless.

XI

ON SEPTEMBER 2 1948, three years to the day after he had
stood on the deck of the battleship Missouri to take Japan's
surrender, General MacArthur issued an enthusiastic and
ringing statement of praise for the progress of the Japanese
under his occupation: "They have here, in a confused and be-
wildered world, a ralm and wefl-ordered society dedicated

to the sanctity of peace There need be no fear concerning

the future pattern of Japanese life, for the Japanese people
have fully demonstrated their will and their capacity to ab-
sorb into their own culture sound ideas, well tested in the

176

crucible of Western experience. [This progress] points with
unmistakable clarity to the fallacy of the oft-expressed dogma
that the East and the West are separated by such impenetra-
ble social, cultural and racial distinctions as to render impos-
sible the absorption by the one of the ideas and concepts of
the other. It emphasized again the immutable truism that
sound ideas cannot be stopped."

The general had good reason at the time for much of his
optimism. For in the three years which had passed since he
first touched down at Atsugi airport near Tokyo his occupa-
tion forces had destroyed Japan's military machine, purged
its wartime leaders, supervised free elections, freed the edu-
cational system of state control, ordered the propaganda-
filled textbooks rewritten, abolished Shinto as an authoritar-
ian religion and proclaimed religious freedom, broken up the
huge industrial combines, driven the ultranationalists into
hiding, encouraged the emancipation and enfranchisement of
women, helped draft a new constitution which demoted the
Emperor and renounced war, decentralized the hated police
forces, reformed the courts and provided for habeas corpus,
put a stop to thought control, and decreed a sweeping pro-
gram of land reform under which two minion former tenants
bought land from their feudal landlords and struck out on
their own. It was an impressive beginning.

The defeated, humiliated Japanese were so surprised by
the lack of revenge and cruelty shown them by American
troops, and so grateful for the food which MacArthur
brought in when they fully expected he would let them
starve, that they responded to his aloof paternalism as if he
were the Emperor's own replacement. They affectionately
called him Ma Gensui ("Field Marshal Mac") and they
thronged the sidewalks daily outside the Dai Ichi Building to

FOR VICTORY 177

see him arrive for work and depart. To afl appearances he
had Japan in the palm of his hand.

The Japanese, who are the first to admit that they borrowed
much of their original culture from ancient China and Korea,
bent with the new American winds of reform and change like
a grove of green bamboo. Eager to absorb the way of life
which the Americans were thrusting upon them the Japa-
nese tongue pronounced it "democrassy** they went all out
to acquire at least the symbols. Since America was the model
democracy as well as their esteemed conqueror, they would
try to be just like Americans in as many ways as possible. As
the two thousand-year-old nation went about learning the
ways of its hundred-and-seventy-five-year-old teacher, the
result was nothing short of a major social revolution.

Many women who had never worn skirts in their lives dis-
carded their obis, geta, and kimonos and hurriedly whipped
up new wardrobes with whatever old material they could
find. Young Japanese couples, watching GIs make public love
to their newly Westernized girl friends, threw strict tribal
custom to the winds and followed suit They walked band in
hand down the streets a practice unheard of before the war
cuddled closely in the grassy parks, and embraced in the
movies. Japanese radio stations scheduled programs of Eng-
lish lessons. Movie studios began for the first time to film
torrid love scenes, replete with thirty-second kisses. Street
stalls in Tokyo's Ginza had a thriving bonanza in lipsticks,
rouge, eye shadow of aH colors, and to correct a common
Japanese deficiency mass-produced rubber f alsies*

Hundreds of thousands of women, now walking abreast of
their husbands instead of two paces behind, went dutifully to
the polls in the first election and sent thirty-nine women the
first in Japan's history to the National Diet Women tradi-
tionally had been expected and trained to be no more than

178

delicate ornaments in the home, slaves in the kitchen, and the
loyal bearers and keepers of the gang of children which every
Japanese family is expected to raise like so many national
treasures. Right up to the end of the war the accepted semi-
official attitude toward women was still that found in a guide
for feminine education written by a seventeenth-century
scholar named Kaibara Ekken: "She should get up early and
retire late, never lie down during the day, keep busy, not
neglecting spinning, weaving and sewing. She should not
drink much of such things as tea and sake wine . . . should
refrain from going to temples, shrines and other crowded
pkces before she is forty years old." This attitude still persists
among many old Japanese. Yet here the women were in 1946,
wearing suits and blouses, mixing in politics, asking men to
vote for them and helping to run the country. "The women of
Japan," said MacArthur to a visiting delegation of them, "are
responding magnificently to the challenge of democracy. 3 *

The revolution spread to other fields. MacArthur decreed
that there should be labor unions. Feeble attempts had been
made long before the war to organize Japanese labor, but the
zaibatsu capitalists, the army, and the innate conservatism of
the Japanese people had mitigated against them. Now, with
MacArthur's blessing, the old labor leaders came out of hid-
ing and the movement mushroomed until in the short space
of one year the unions had a total membership of more than
a million and were calling for a general strike. The poorly
paid, overworked laborers thought democrassy was fine.

While labor was busy learning American methods of or-
ganization and action, their employers were also looking
around. Saddled with inefficient production methods and the
necessity to streamline their plants if they were to recapture
their share of the world market, Japanese industrialists sent
engineers to the U.S. to price American machines and study

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 179

mass production techniques. In most cases the machines
turned out to be too expensive for the bankrupt Japanese, but
a few large companies discarded their old methods and went
to work with everything from modern infrared racks for dry-
ing newly painted automobiles, copied from Detroit, to
belching open-hearth furnaces copied from Pittsburgh.

Even the Japanese vocabulary sputtered with unexpected
Americanisms. The Japanese had long called their depart-
ment stores "depato** and ridden to their top floors in the
"erebeta." And baseball, which had been popular in Japan
for many years, had long rung with cries of "sutoraifctT and
"boru" (the Japanese commonly make a word their own by
ending it with the vowel u). But since the war the Japanese
had added many more: "Boogie-woogie, 9 * "dancu party,**
* penicillin," "new looku," and "sutoripu [burlesque]!* A fill-
ing station near Kyoto erected a sign which was the final
touch: "Last chancu."

But despite the alacrity with which the Japanese set about
imitating their American conquerors, and despite the impact
with which American customs and ideals dented the surface
of their society, they were also able, from the veiy start, to
preserve a good deal of their own individuality and status
quo. The Americans had installed new engines in the ship of
state, provided new charts, and even changed the crew on
the bridge. But the Japanese retained their own anchor. And
as the ship got up steam and slowly left the port, with its

the rail, few Americans aboard ever noticed that the anchor

was

The military clique was gone, and many of its members
were either dead or in jail The politicians who had co-
operated with the clique were discredited and out of office.
But the lower levels of the bureaucracy the thousands of

180

government workers and civil servants needed to man the
boilers were necessarily the same who had shipped out be-
fore. MacArthur's directives from Washington had read
clearly on this point: "In view of the present character of the
Japanese society and the desire of the U.S. to attain its ob-
jectives with a minimum commitment of its forces and re-
sources, the Supreme Commander will exercise his authority
through Japanese governmental machinery and agencies, in-
cluding the Emperor. . . . The policy is to use the existing
form of government in Japan, not to support it. Changes in
the form of government initiated by the Japanese people or
government in the direction of modifying its feudal and
authoritarian tendencies are to be permitted and favored."
It should not be surprising that the Japanese government
initiated little or nothing. It was willing to bend like bamboo
in the wind, but not to be yanked up by the roots. Besides,
Japan had little experience in the workings of democracy.
Even those officials who were not purged and stayed on to
manage the government did not want a real democracy. They
were not dangerous ultranationalists the only criterion for
the purge but they were not democratic either. They were
seasoned old-guard bureaucrats whose entire tradition was
one of authoritarian government, in which the people are
assumed incapable of making their own decisions, and in
which the elite rule for all. From the very start MacArthur
had to provide most of the initiative himself. Thus democ-
racy, instead of springing from the Japanese with the help of
their own leaders, had to be thrust upon them in the form of
U. S. Army decrees. It was MacArthur's military government
teams, not the Japanese, who saw to it that the local schools,
police departments, and courts were purged of personnel
who had shown ultranationalist tendencies in the past and
could not be trusted with the task of preserving order or of

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY

inculcating Japanese youth with the new way of life. Four
months after the occupation began, General Courtney Whit-
ney, MacArthur's government chief, announced that his office
had been forced to order the Japanese to purge the govern-
ment of many workers still remaining at their desks who had
helped foment and direct the war against us. It had been
hoped,** Whitney said with an air of exasperated disappoint-
ment, "that Japan itself would clean its own stable."

Japanese statesmen were often annoyingly obtuse and cun-
ning as they dragged their feet on important matters or pre-
tended not to understand just what it was the Americans
were driving at. Their habit of balking began early. During
the rewriting of the constitution which had previously called
the Emperor "sacred and inviolable" the Japanese tried to
get away with suggesting that the wording merely be
changed to read "supreme and inviolable. 9 * Hie Americans
explained that this missed the point entirely: the Emperor
was not supreme; and he was not inviolable either. He was
merely a figurehead, the "symbol of the state and of the unity
of the people," as we put it, but with no more rank for this
was to be a democracy than any Japanese fanner or office
worker. The Japanese nodded and wrote the American phrase
"symbol of the state and of the unity of the people" into
their constitution. It is doubtful that many of them even
knew what it meant.

Then Prime Minister Yoshida, a crusty and conservative
little diplomat who had made himself acceptable to us by
coming out in the last days of the war as a worker for peace
but who was not a man of great democratic inclinations-
started to drag his feet too. Yoshida wrote MacArthur that he
thought it was imperative for the new constitution to retain
some old criminal statutes which provided for punishment as
high treason any attempt on the Emperor's life or on that of

182

his family. ( Japanese law had also stipulated that a man who
murdered a stranger was not nearly so criminal as a man who
murdered his own father, ) Yoshida argued that these were
sound Japanese ideas, rooted in national ethics, and should
be retained. Even as the "symbol of the state," he argued,
throwing our words back at us, the Emperor would "ethically
[be] the center of national veneration/* A crime against him,
therefore, must be treated with more severity than a crime
against an ordinary individual.

If MacArthur had any doubts at this point about the social
and cultural ideas of the East being just like those of the
West, he did not let on. He wrote Yoshida that Use-majest^
might have been considered a special crime in old Japan, but
that it was unheard of in a democracy and such a law had
never been practiced in America. "As the symbol of the state
and of the unify of the people," he added, "the Emperor is
entitled to no more and no less legal protection than that ac-
corded to all other citizens of Japan, who, in the aggregate,
constitute the state itself." That was that, and Yoshida finally
yielded.

With MacArthur's prodding, the American imprint was
stamped even further. When the Japanese failed to provide a
preamble for their new constitution, the general took pen in
hand and sent along a draft of his own prose: "We, the Japa-
nese people, acting through our duly elected representatives
. . . determined that we shall secure for ourselves and our
posterity the fruits of peaceful cooperation . . . and the bless-
ings of liberty throughout this land ... do proclaim the
sovereignty of the people's will and do ordain and establish
this constitution, founded upon the universal principle that
government is a sacred trust the authority for which is de-
rived from the people, the powers of which are exercised by
the representatives of the people, and the benefits of which

SUBSTITUTE FOR VECIOKT 183

are enjoyed by the people." Though this was a fine American
blend of Jefferson and Lincoln, the statement was almost de-
void of any Japanese meaning or spirit, even in a Japanese
translation. But the Japanese, still bending like supple bam-
boo, dutifully tacked it on.

At the height of the debate over the constitution, when the
Americans were trying to change and reform as much as they
could, and the Japanese were trying to hang onto as much as
they could, a heated argument broke out one day in General
Whitney's office. That night one of the Japanese who had
been present sat down and wrote Whitney a note trying to
explain the deadlock. "Your way is so American/* he wrote,
"that it is straight and direct. Their way," he added, apologiz-
ing for his die-hard friends, "must be Japanese in the way
that it is roundabout, twisted and narrow. Your way may be
called an Airway and their way a Jeep, over bumpy roads. (I
know the roads are bumpy.) I think I appreciate your stand-
point well and I must confess I have a great admiration for it
as I have for so many things American. I still am an ardent
admirer of Lindbergh's flight across the 'uncharted* Atlantic,
for the first time and unaided. But alas! The Lindberghs are
so rare and far between, even in America. I do not know if we

ever had one in this country I am afraid I have already

accelerated the paper shortage by writing this mumble, but I
know you will forgive me for my shortcomings, for which my
late father is also partly responsible/*

The writer of this letter was sincere in his criticism and
merely felt, as a friend, that the Americans should gp a little
slower as they tampered with such an ancient and compli-
cated culture as the Japanese. So did many others. But fee
Americans were still determined to make Japan conform to
their own pattern, and when MacArthur finally despaired of
getting the constitution he wanted from the Japanese, he put

184

a staff of Americans to work preparing a long memorandum.
In effect it was a draft constitution, and he made it clear that
he desired the Japanese to accept it as their own, whether
they fully understood it or not. At this point Dr. Joji Matsu-
moto, chairman of the Japanese committee drafting the con-
stitution, wrote a scholarly paper explaining that Japan actu-
ally considered herself to be more like the Weimar Republic
in Germany after World War I than like America, and
scholarly old Matsumoto pointed out, as politely as he could,
that "only native institutions, slowly developed over the years
and tested by time and experience, would survive. A juridical
system," he warned, *is very much like certain kinds of
plants, which transplanted from their native soil degenerate
or even die. Some of the roses of the West, when cultivated
in Japan,** Matsumoto concluded gently, lose their fra-
grance."

Wise old Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura, Japan's ambassador
to Washington at the time of Pearl Harbor, also tendered his
advice: "[I have] strong doubt whether the new Constitu-
tion may not be too advanced in its provisions to suit the
prevalent standard of the Japanese nation. . . . Despite a great
many virtues, the Japanese still remain on a low level of
social education, being self -centered, eager in seeking their
own profit before others, and negligent of communal service
and obligation. . . . These socially undisciplined people are
apt to abuse freedom. . . . The apparel belonging to an adult
must needs have alterations before being put on a child.**

But the general was not to be swayed by such sweet or
sensible words. Whenever the Japanese argued, the Ameri-
cans seemed to feel they were less motivated by an honest
concern with reality than by a desire merely to water down
our reforms. Democracy or democrassy, the Japanese were
going to learn it the American way. "A sound idea," Mac-

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 185

Arthur repeated, "cannot be stopped* Finally, in despera-
tion, the Japanese officials took their problems to the Em-
peror, who, as the symbol of the state, sighed and sagely
advised the committee to proceed with full reform as re-
quested by the Americans. He knew how to bend like the
willow too. This was enough for the committee and they
completed revision of the constitution along the lines of M ao-
Arthur's memo. An Eastern nation was to begin aH over
again, this time with a Western pattern superimposed.

How has it all worked out? Has the Western rose lost its
fragrance?

In May of 1952 a by-election was held for the upper house
of the Diet. In the village of Ueno, Fuji County, Shizuoka
Prefecture some 140 miles from Tokyo the village bosses
looked up all those who had no intention of voting, collected
their poll-admission tickets, and then, with the full knowledge
of the election officials, used the tickets to admit a number of
partisan voters more than once. Satsuki Ishikawa, a seven-
teen-year-old girl who had just learned enough about democ-
racy in her school civics class to know that this was not right,
wrote a letter to the authorities. As a result the village head-
man, the chairman of the election commission, and a dozen
others were arrested by the police. Ten of these were later in-
dicted. Democracy was thus protected. But the village had
its revenge on Satsuki Invoking the old rural custom of
murahacJubu or boycott, 1 no one in the village spoke to the
family or visited its house. Satsukf s father., a farm laborer,
was denied work. And the high school newspaper carried an
article condemning Satsuki: *lt is not human that one should
incriminate others who live in the same village. Even thougb

a The boycott is only ninety per cent A natural disaster, soch as a fire,
would bring the villagers running to help, if only to save their own
paper houses from burning down.

186

a fact like that existed, it is outrageous for anyone to expose
it. It is against the etiquette of the villager." After that, when-
ever Satsuki walked by the fields the people would point at
her. "There goes the spy/* they scoffed "There goes the Com-
mie."

The Japanese society is a complex and well-balanced sys-
tem of loyalties and alliances, painstakingly designed over
many centuries so as to fit the greatest number of people
(now more than 80,000,000) into the smallest available space
(smaller than California which has a population of 11,000,-
000) with the least amount of human friction and bumping
together. When the Japanese bow to each other, which they
do incessantly, even on crowded elevators, it is not so much
out of simple politeness as from a psychological need to keep
in the exact proper social balance and relationship with other
people, including their bosses and their hired help, at all
times. They know instinctively who is to stop bowing first.

Japanese education, which in the early years is necessarily
concerned chiefly with the task of teaching youngsters the
thousands of Chinese characters which make up their alpha-
bet, is thus so saddled with pure memory work that there is
little time for really imaginative teaching or for the exchange
of eye-opening ideas. The teacher becomes the temporary
authority and the child learns early to buckle down and con-
form. Conformity is the rule. Schoolboys from grade school
through college wear drab black uniforms with black caps.
Schoolgirls are not allowed to curl their hair they must wear
it long and braided, and straight. This rule is invoked so
strictly that one poor girl in Tokyo, who happens to have
natwdUy curly hair a rare phenomenon was recently ousted
from her classes. The principal, who had a rule to conform to,
did not believe her excuse. When last I heard of her case it

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 187

was still being appealed to the Minister of Education. Such
emphasis on conformity results in a standardized, introverted
personality which does not, of course, encourage the flower-
ing of democracy. An old Buddhist saying still pertains to-
day: "A stake which lifts its head higher than the others will
be driven down."

As long as they can remember, the Japanese have lived on a
human pyramid. There has always been someone on top to
serve as the keystone, whether lie was the Emperor, the
feudal landlord, the office boss, or simply one's own father.
No Japanese in his right mind would think of slipping out of
place, lest the entire pyramid come tumbling down and he
find himself in lonely isolation, without the social and eco-
nomic security which that pyramid alone affords him.

Right up through the wax the Japanese nation rested on a
base of neighborhood associations called Tonari GumL Every
ten houses formed a unit; several units formed a neighbor-
hood (a pyramid in itself); and the neighborhoods made up
larger county or city units which fitted into the national
pyramid controlled by Tojo. The small local associations
served many purposes. The politicians used them much like
U.S. ward bosses use their dubs, to round up votes except
that in Japan the structure was much tighter and the vote one
hundred per cent assured. When Tojo needed to buck up the
nation, he passed the word *Don*t be afraid* down through
the network of Tonari Guini and all Japan responded with
its courage. The associations were used to organize air raid
drills and warnings. If the mayor wished to announce that
everyone must have medical shots, he used Tonari Gumi to
spread the news. During food shortages, crops were collected
and rations of rice distributed in turn through Tonari Gumi.
Therefore, if one wished to eat, or get fair warning of an
Allied raid, or procure his share o precious fertilizer for his

188

farm, he had to stay on the pyramid where he belonged and
conform to all the rules. If he did not, he was left out just
like the family of Satsuki Ishikawa, who tattled on the wrong-
doings of her village elders.

The Tonari Gumi are not dead. For though MacArthur de-
stroyed the organization of authoritarianism in Japan and
lopped off the top levels the Tojos and their kind he did not
and could not destroy the latent power. We did not rip the
Tonari Gumi up by the roots. We could not. And according
to a post-occupation newspaper poll, seventy per cent of the
country people and thirty per cent of those in the cities want
the system restored. One of Yoshida's own cabinet ministers
went on record, saying he thought it would be a good idea.

This does not mean the Japanese are getting ready for war.
In fact just the opposite is true. The Japanese are violently
and sincerely pacifist these days. And the Tonari Gumi, as we
have seen, had many peaceful uses. Neither does the Japa-
nese yearning for a pyramidal existence mean they want dic-
tatorship. For unless it is taken over on the top level by a
strong clique, the Tonari Gumi system is not necessarily
fascistic. It serves merely as a convenient hierarchy which
helps keep everyone sorted out in a crowded land. The long-
ing does indicate, however, that the Japanese feel much more
comfortable and secure when they climb back up on their
cozy pyramids than they do trying to live in a democracy
which requires that they all spread out separately on an even
plane and figure things out for themselves.

Once, in the process of working on a Life story, photog-
rapher Margaret Bourke-White and I found ourselves spend-
ing the night in a small farming village some sixty miles north
of Tokyo. After a chopstick supper of bean-paste soup, raw
egg poured over rice, salted plums, raw fish, and sake wine ( a
meal which was repeated the next morning at breakfast) we

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 189

attended a political meeting called by members of the ninety
farmhouses in the village. The peace treaty had been signed
and the occupation was over, but throughout the long years
of the occupation no other Americans had ever stopped in
this village, much less submitted themselves to a Japanese
meal there, and the people were fascinated When the neigh-
borhood meeting was over, the village elders invited Miss
Bourke-White and me to answer some questions. Tlirough an
interpreter they asked about farming conditions in America
and were very pleased when Peggy, who had recently photo-
graphed the U.S. South, told them that a Japanese plant, the
kudzu vine, was revolutionizing crop rotation there. Then a
young farm leader raised his hand and directed a question at
me. Under the land reform program, he explained, he had
had to sell some of his land to his tenant. He thought the
program was a fine idea, but he had some complaints. For
one thing, the price he was paid for his land was so low (after
inflation had cut into his cash) that it meant he had practi-
cally given the land away. For another thing, his taxes were
too high. And, thirdly, he thought it criminally unfair to the
farmers that the price on cultivating machinery had been
allowed to rise, to the benefit of industry, far faster than the
prices fee was getting for his crops. Would I please convey his
complaints to the proper American authorities in Tokyo, he
requested politely, and what did I think about his plight?

He thought he had me;, and for a moment, while I sat on
the floor and sipped my tea in front of all those smiling
people, I thought he did too. What could I say? Tbm I
realized he was sitting, figuratively, on a pyramid and asking
someone who was not even in the same triangle to help him
out I explained as best I could that in proclaiming land re-
form the Americans had not prescribed the details or set the
price of cultivators. We had merely told the Japanese govern-

190

merit to see to it that farmers were allowed to own the land
they fanned. The details were left for the Japanese to fill in.
I reminded him that the occupation was now over, that he
had a Diet member who was in the room at the time his
government had a Minister for Land and Agriculture, and
that he and his wife each had a vote. If he did not like the
way things were going, his best and only recourse was to do
what he could to change it at the next election. If enough
people felt as he did, the situation would certainly be
changed. I could not resist adding that that was how it was
done in America and how we hoped it could be done in
Japan. The entire crowd nodded gratefully as if this were a
brand-new idea which had never occurred to them. The Diet
member told me later he had tried for months to teach his
people this principle of democratic government. He doubted
whether either of us had convinced them.

Actually, though land reform has been the most popular of
all occupational reforms so much so that the Commimists
have tried to take credit for it themselves it has left Japan
with a number of serious problems to work out. The idealistic
zeal with which the Americans guided the program through
its inception failed, in the first place, to take into account a
few basic realities of the Japanese situation. In outlining the
reforms, for example, we insisted that the old customs of
primogeniture by which only the first son was allowed to in-
herit the farm on his father's death be abolished, and that
all the children be allowed to share equally in the inherit-
ance. It was a noble idea and was written into the law of the
land. But well-meaning as it was, it has simply not worked
out. The size of the average farm in Japan is only two and
one half acres hardly enough to support one family and the
practical Japanese could only chuckle at the idea of dividing
these tiny farms any further. In practice, therefore, they are

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 191

ignoring the law. Either the father gives his farm to the eldest
son before he dies, in order to circumvent the law, or the
younger brothers and sisters wisely let their inheritance go
by default to their older brother and take off for the cities
as they always have to look for jobs as day laborers, police-
men, or streetcar conductors.

One of our purposes in pushing the reform was to free the
tenants of serfdom and thus raise their social status and
spread democracy into the rural areas. We had high hopes
that, once on their own, the former tenants would take an
active interest in local government and would assume their
rightful places on the local city councils and school boards
which were once dominated by the landlords. La some in-
stances this has happened. But in most villages the new land-
owners still feel inferior to their former landlords and explain
sadly that they lack the education and experience to fulfill
our hopes. Furthermore^ the former tenants hasten to add,
the landlords of Japan never were big feudal tyrants as in
Europe, but were for the most part hard-working smalltime
farmers themselves, who merely rented out their extra land
(usually only two acres or so) and took good care of the
tenants in bad times. The new landowners, then, despite their
pride of ownership, are content to remain in their places and
to take little more social initiative than they did before. The
only hope is that their sons, who can now get an adequate
education for the first time-because of the families* new
prosperity will be better prepared and inspired in another
generation to fill the new roles.

The farmers, too, feel insecure and slightly unhappy in the
new society. They are blessed with independence, and the
challenge to their initiative and self-reliance is a healthy one.
They no longer pay half their crop in rent but are allowed, as
free-enterprisers, to keep whatever profits they can make.

192

The initiative is theirs. But to the Japanese peasant, whose
entire experience has been one of fitting onto a pyramid like
everyone else, such independence can also be a curse. They
must now pay their own taxes, buy their own seed, and take
their own risks in times of poor harvest. These risks were
once assumed by the landlords. The feeling is growing among
the new landowners that the old days were somehow more
secure. Though the Americans, who thought up the program,
can thrive on such challenges, the Japanese, who lack our
long background of freedom and pioneering, are more likely
to suffer and worry. Like many non-Americans, they think
that we are democratic only because we are rich, and that
somehow the possession of rights is linked to the possession
of automobiles which they do not, and cannot, have. In many
areas today the former tenants are secretly and voluntarily
selling their land back to their former landlords and crawling
back, with no sense of loss, onto the old pyramid. The reform
came too fast and too sweepingly for them. It came from the
outside and was not something they themselves had fought
for. And it arrived in the midst of an economy so shattered by
war and so erratic that the benefits were more costly than
they could afford.

Japan has profited, in the long run, from the great experi-
ment of land reform. And this will probably be the most last-
ing monument to our occupation. But, like all our reforms, it
will have to be shaken down some until it better fits the Japa-
nese character and the facts of Japanese economic and social
life. The rose will lose a little more of its fragrance.

The same sort of thing is happening to some of our other
basic reforms. In the process of emancipating women and re-
vising the educational system, we suggested that the Japa-
nese adopt co-education. (In the past, boys and girls had
been separated after fourth grade and the girls given heavy

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 193

doses of home economics and watered-down courses in his-
tory, geography, languages, and some science. ) The Japanese
educators obeyed our dictum and today the two sexes share
the same classrooms and the same textbooks. But even in the
most progressive schools professors have been heard to ad-
monish their students that it is one thing for them to mingle
in the classroom, and quite another and less desirable matter
for them to fraternize publicly outside. These teachers, like
the girls* parents and grandparents, would like to see them
put safely and snugly back in their place.

We tried to break down the political control over teachers
who had been used by the state to teach the verities of Jap-
anese nationalism and thus free the teachers to help spread
the new ideas of freedom and democratic gpvernment In
many communities the teachers, smelling fresh air for the
first time in their lives, became interested in politics and in
after-hours missionary work for democracy. One of the first
bills Premier Yoshida introduced before the Diet after the oc-
cupation ended, however, was a law providing that the na-
tional government regain control of education and put the
teachers back on the national payroll where they can BO
longer ajBFord to mix in politics or spread any gospel which is
frowned upon by the Cabinet. Mr. Yoshida explained, as he
submitted the bill, that he was forced to undo some of the
"excesses of the occupation/*

As Japan's ship of state continued on its postwar shake-
down cruise, other weaknesses began to appear. To protect
the public from police repression and abuse, we had decen-
tralized the police force and stripped it of so much power and
prestige that the police had a difficult time, especially during
Communist riots, preserving everyday law and order. Hie
Japanese had argued bitterly against the reforms whea they
were first proposed, and now, in hindsight, ft appears they

194

knew what they were talking about. Another bill which Mr.
Yoshida introduced also to undo some of our "excesses"
provided for the ^centralization of rural and city police,
under his control.

Communist elements took such advantage of Japan's weak-
ness and confusion during the spring of 1952 that the govern-
ment also felt it necessary to force through the Diet an anti-
subversive-activities bill which is far from democratic in its
implications. The bill provides for the abolishment of any
organization which plans, instigates, or carries out acts detri-
mental to the security of the state. But its wording is so vague
and sweeping that it smacks to many Japanese of the
thought-control laws of old Japan most of which also started
out harmlessly enough. Should a strong clique with dicta-
torial tendencies come along one of these days, the bill is
there, waiting to be used in any manner the government
deems fitting. The Japanese don't like it, but there is nothing
much they can do about it. The Communists, in this case, did
a fine favor for their worst enemies by strengthening the
government's hand against non-conformity of all kinds.

Some of MacArthur's officers were realistic enough to fore-
see these problems from the start. "There is no magic," said
an early SCAP section report, "whereby liberty, equality and
fraternity can spring full grown, even from a violent indige-
nous revolution still less from the peaceful reforms of a
benevolent conqueror. The disarmament and demilitarization
of the Japanese military machine and war potential, the de-
concentration and decentralization of Japanese political and
economic power, and the def eudalization of the Japanese sys-
tem of family organization, of land tenure, and of labor
servitude, have not automatically resulted in the immediate
establishment of a democratic society.**

That was the understatement of the year. But such dis-

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 195

claimers never caught up with the general enthusiasm in
Tokyo and with MacArthur's own sense of drama. One after
another, U.S. experts in various fields went to Japan to lend a
hand. They were given guided tours of the countryside, had
lunch or an interview with MacArthur, and came home full
of praise for the new society we were building there. It is
true that MacArthur accomplished a tremendous amout of
good. But the very magnitude and daring of the undertaking
required an assumption from the start that we would have
the time and the peace in which to complete it. It is difficult
to see how anyone thought we could change the character
and the habits of such an ancient and complex structure as
Japan in less than forty years. It would have required of least
the time required to re-educate two generations of Japanese
before we could be certain that our basic ideas and philoso-
phy had taken root Even then we could never be sure that
they would continue to develop on their own.

But we did not have that time. And we did not have the
peace. Instead, we soon found ourselves fighting a war from
bases in Japan, using Japanese ships to land troops and sup-
plies in Korea, and asking the Japanese munitions makers to
go back to turning out mortar sheQs this time for our use in
Korea.

We even had to change our mind about demilitarization.
When we realized that peace was not in the cards we sug-
gested that the Japanese get cracking again on plans for an
army, to help them defend their own islands and thus free
our occupation troops for action in Korea. Tlie Japanese re-
sponded and formed a National Police Reserve (actually a
pseudonym for "army"). We provided American personnel
to train the troops, and equipped them with everything from
U.S. rifles to tanks and artillery pieces. We turned over some
ships so the Japanese could form a new navy also for self-

196

defense and began training Japanese pilots (in cub planes)
for a future air force.

The Japanese public is far from happy about all this. The
people may not always have understood the democracy we
tried to give them, but they craved the pacifism we also
thrust upon them with our victory. The war had been a ter-
rible burden; and though the Japanese may never have been
truly sorry for the aggressive and arrogant plan for Asia
which led them into it, the bombings, the suffering, and the
defeat hurt them deeply, and it created in their hearts a
profound contempt for war itself and for all its trappings.
For the present, at any rate, their hatred of war and then-
love of pacifism is such that none but the poorest young man,
who can find no other work on the farms or in the factories,
can be prevailed upon to don the uniform of the Police Re-
serve. The soldier's profession in Japan these days is not an
honorable one. We did, at least, see to that.

XII

IF THE RUSSIANS staged the war in Korea for no other
reason than to stir up a disturbing undertow of political
unrest in nearby Japan, some commissar in the Kremlin was
using his head. For the war forced us to make a shift in our
Japanese policy which sent ripples of discontent in aH
directions.

The Japanese government, in its handling of the rearma-
ment problem, has reflected the public's craving for pacifism.
The profession of arms is so unpopular that Premier Yoshida
has been forced to sponsor legislation for the recruiting and

198

arming of soldiers (under the pseudonym of Police Re-
serves") while at the same time denying, in public that he was
engaging in rearmament at all. He has stated publicly many
times that Japan is not morally ready for rearmament. And
until very recently, when American officials went to Trim and
pleaded with him to step up the pace a little, so they could
free more occupation and defense troops for duty elsewhere,
Yoshida had only to quote the article in Japan's constitution
which General MacArthur himself insisted upon: Japan "for-
ever renounces" war. Even now, despite a change in his own
personal attitude, Yoshida risks political trouble with the op-
position whenever he inches toward rearmament.

As Japan rearms, her true liberals who are committed to
a policy of pacifism and democracy find themselves out on
a limb from which there is no retreat Japan must rearm,
but as she does so she will necessarily become less and less
democratic. And all Japanese, from left to right, have a terri-
fying sense of being caught in the middle of a conflict be-
tween Russia and die U.S. which will not leave them un-
scathed. Most of them want no part of it. This is not a war,
they feel, from which they will gain anything. They do not
really fear Communism; and most of them do not really crave
democracy. They only wish we would pack up our men and
our planes and go away. They want to sit this one out. But
that is not in the cards, either, and the Japanese know it. In
the political confusion which this frustrating situation pro-
duces, opportunists of all sorts are crawling out of the vol-
canic lava. Those forces of democracy which are left in Japan
are in serious danger of being trampled underfoot in the
shuffle.

The first opportunists to take the stage were the Com-
munists. The Japanese Commuoist Party has only about
75,000 registered members, and its leaders have long been

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 199

underground. (In the early, halcyon days, MacArthur freed
the Communist leaders along with other political prisoners
we found in Japanese jails when we landed as a gesture of
magnanimity. When the leaders reciprocated later by getting
tough, they were obliged to get out of sight again. ) At first
the Communists (who won nearly ten per cent of the vote in
the 1949 general elections) contented themselves with de-
crying the desperate economic situation. Then, claiming
to be the only true champions of Japanese nationalism (a
role which was later to get them into trouble with the
real nationalists }, they widened their sights and began to
attack the government and other parties as lackeys of the
Americans.

Their appeal was particularly strong among students and
intellectuals, most of whom were suffering economically and
were also, because of their margin of sophistication, the
groups most likely to question the motives of the Americans
in Japan and to resent our presence there. The Japanese
language is rich in puns, and the intellectual?^ who delight in
making them, were quick to point out that *democrassy w
could also be pronounced * e dsmokrushy > from the Japanese
word demo (meaning "on the other hand") and kurushii
(meaning "difficult," "suffering,* or "impossible 5 * ).

It was to be expected, when the occupation honeymoon
was over, that the Japanese, like partners in many quickie
marriages especially of a mixed characterwould find some
faults with their better half. It was natural that they should
have tired of trying to ingratiate themselves, and would
eventually begin to take our presence in their land more as a
necessary evil tfr" as a welcome salvation. Tlie romance was
exciting at first; there were new ideas to try out, new dothes
to wear; we ware the victors and for a time we were in al-
lible. But they soon became bored with the marriage and this

200

attitude showed itself in many ways, some of them suhtle
and others not so subtle.

First of all, the Japanese made no bones about wanting
back for their own use all the office buildings, private houses,
hotels, playgrounds, and harbor installations which we had
monopolized for years for our forces. A good number of bars
and night clubs in Tokyo erected their own crude "Off
Limits'* signs, in an effort to preserve the liquor and the
hostesses inside for the steady, Japanese clientele who more
and more sought places of refuge where they could drink
and chat without the ubiquitous GI stumbling over them to
reach the next table. Most Japanese agreed wholeheartedly
with these attitudes.

The Communists tried to capitalize on this growing restive-
ness. It was their best chance to gain attention and find an
avenue to power. After the Korean war began they stepped
up their anti-Americanism. "Yankee, GO HOME!" was their
battle cry. And, beginning with May Day, 1952, they waged
an almost continuous war of nerves on the police, the MPs,
and any Americans who happened by throwing Molotov
cocktails, wielding spiked bamboo poles, and setting fire to
American sedans parked across the street from the Emperor's
palace. Their shock troops in most of these battles were
drawn from Japan's population of 700,000 Koreans. Among
these unhappy people are thousands of tough, hotheaded
young men who were brought to Japan from North Korea
during the war to replace drafted Japanese workers in the
factories. When the war ended and the Japanese returned to
take back their jobs, the Koreans were left without work.
There was also no way they could go back to Communist
North Korea. Syngman Rhee, who hates the Japanese almost
as much as he hates North Koreans perhaps more so re-
fused to take the young toughs off Japan's hands. Conse-

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 201

quentiy, without work and without any other place to go,
they remained as a floating and f earless group of dissidents
who had nothing whatever to lose by letting the Communists
use them. One of them reached through the window of a car
in Kobe one day, during a labor riot I was covering, and
punched me squarely in the face. I can attest to their
strength.

But the Communists probably in Moscow, where the
orders for most of these disorders origmated-misealculated
and misunderstood the Japanese people. The Japanese were
horrified by the Communists* tactics. They may not have
loved the Americans by then, but neither did they hate them.
And they were tremendously embarrassed by the violence of
May Day. One of the major mistakes the Reds made that day
was fighting outside the Emperor's palace. In the next general
election the Japanese electorate showed its contempt for
Communist methods and its complete lack of interest in
Communist salvation by voting every Red in the Diet out of
office. The Communists were shaken, and after receiving a
new batch of orders from Moscow to behave themselves they
shifted their course and tried wooing the Japanese public
by being ^nice" Ctammunists.

That approach will not woik either. I do not think there
is any danger that Japan will ever go Comrnmrist Lake any
country, she trfH go Red, of course, if she is ever captured
and conquered by Communists from the otrfs&fe which, we
must guard against. But Japan, despite all her problems, is
not a fertile field for Communist conversion from within.
The danger in Japan, to the calm, sober society we tried to
erect there, is from the other extreme: the far right

Japan is basically a rural nation. Most of her population
lies scattered across the mountainous island in tiny farm
villages, isolated from one another by miles of muddy pad-

202

dies and isolated from new ideas by the conservatism, the
ancient traditions, and the religious nature of the people.

I happened upon a small fanning village one day while
the people were celebrating the advent of land reform. They
were holding a parade and a fair and consecrating a huge
stone monument to the wonders of reform. But the parade
was a religious one, led by the priests and participated in by
group after group of solemn-faced old women, all dressed
alike in their black gowns and all murmuring religious chants
to the rhythm of tiny bells they held in their gnarled hands.
The stone monument was impressive. It was also immensely
enlightening. For the transcription on the monument, which
was to commemorate the new land reform, was actually dedi-
cated to the memory of a local saint who had tried vainly to
institute agrarian reforms five hundred years earlier. The
people were proud of the new reform, but they had not for-
gotten their saint either. And in a fashion which only the
Japanese could think of, they linked the two ideas together
on a stone tablet in the burial yard of their village's Shinto
temple.

These people will never go Communist of their own accord.
And neither, perhaps, will they fall into line again with the
chauvinistic rantings of the rightist leaders at the other end
of the spectrum. The latter, however, have a far better chance
of success and a greater claim on Japanese minds.

The rightists and ultranationalists kept out of sight during
the occupation, for though the Japanese public remained ex-
tremely conservative, dedicated to ancient virtues and proud
of its ancestry, most of the people kept these things in their
hearts and tried, out of deference to their conquerors, not to
make a show of them. But the Reds gave them a handy
excuse to regroup. As the Communists shook their fists and
threatened to save the nation from the Americans, the rightist

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 203

groups began to collect their flocks and dust off their swords
and banners to save the nation from the Reds. Many of these
men are second-rate opportunists who are trying to take ad-
vantage of the confusion to wave the Rising Sun flag and rally
a following. Some of them have succeeded in gathering small
groups of disenchanted second and third sons of fanners,
who have no future on the farms and would just as soon
shake their fists as not Most of these groups confine them-
selves to dreaming up flowery manifestoes and bright slogans
and banners with which they hope to attract a larger fol-
lowing.

In their own confusion and excitement they lump all kinds
of aims together: rally around the Emperor and revive the
Emperor system; reorient the youth away from materialism
and back toward religion; merge the religions of the world
into one true gospel ( they all look and sound like evangelists
everywhere ) ; co-operate with the Americans for now at any
rate and accept their aid in fighting the Reds; down with
the capitalists. (It is an ironic fact that most rightist fanatics
hate the zaibatsu, whom they accuse of putting their own
greed and economic power ahead of the general good.)
These splinter rightists strike all kinds of poses with bamboo
clubs and Christian Bibles and pictures of their beloved
Emperor. If they could but merge their forces they might
well get somewhere. But for the most part they are merely
stirring up interest and running interf erence for bigger fish
who are still hiding under the moss. And they are too busy
squabbling and jodceying among themselves for position to
be effectively dangerous.

Far more likely to succeed, both as crowd getters and as
potential keystones of the Tonari Grnni in any future na-
tional adventures, are soberer and more proven men like
Taku Mikami Twenty years ago, when he was a hotheaded

204

young naval lieutenant just out of the academy, Mikami grew
tired of merely brooding over Japan's troubles in Manchuria,
and especially her decision to abide by an international cove-
nant to reduce her naval power. Lieutenant Mikami decided
to take action. With a group of other excited young national-
ists he invaded the home of Prime Minister Inukai and assas-
sinated him. Mikami was jailed, but his crime proved so
popular with the masses of Japanese some of whom even
cut off their fingers and sent them in as traditional proof of
their devotion that he was eventually freed. He had served
his purpose; he had awakened Japan and crystallized her
latent frustrations.

On a gloomy, rainy afternoon one day on Kyushu, which
is Japan's southernmost island and the breeding ground of
her most famous generals and admirals, I looked up Mikami
and found him brooding away in a dark, bamboo-shaded
farmhouse where he was hiding from the curious. After a
cup of steaming tea Mikami got out his bamboo flute and
played some sad, brooding Japanese melodies for me. Then,
through an interpreter, we talked about Japan and her future.
Mikami admitted that both the present and the future looked
bleak to him. But he quickly disclaimed any desire to resort
again to terrorism to gain his objectives.

Between mournful dirges on his flute Mikami dreams of
another mission: he will organize Japan's conservative rural
population to combat Communism (just how he does not
say). Then, when he has the farmers behind him, he will
tackle the students, in order to correct their excessive liberal-
ism and add an intellectual content to his movement. Al-
ready, he told me, he had gone into many communities and
rallied the cadre for this mission. His final aim, when he has
his organization completed, is to launch a one-hundred-year
program to unite the peoples of Japan, Hfiina^ and India. He

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 205

is in no hurry. He will not be around to see the fruition of
his labors. But the program must be started. The reason?
Like most Japanese, he does not think that either Russia or
America offers the proper solution for Japan. Her fate is to
be neither Communist nor democratic. Japan must find her
salvation in a strictly Asiatic manner. And she can do this
only, Mikami says, sipping his tea slowly and speaking
quietly, by offering herself as the core and the ideological
backbone of Pan-Asia.

When last I heard of hi Mikami had moved from Kyushu
to Tokyo presumably to be nearer the seat erf power and the
scene of action. He still disclaimed any further interest in
terrorism. But it is significant that Premier Yoshida's govern-
ment, which must walk the narrow, winding jeep path be-
tween the desires of its own people and the pressures of the
rest of the world, has hired several members of the former
"thought-police* and given them the job of keeping an eye
on both the Communists and the resurgiog nationalists.

At Mito, sixty miles northeast of Tokyo, another famous
Japanese nationalist is thinking along the same lines. He* is
Kosaburo Tachibana, now sixty and in retirement on his five-
acre farm where he also spends his quiet hours playing the
bamboo flute. Mito is the cradle of a brand of Japanese na-
tionalism called Mito-gaku (Mito school). The purpose of the
Mito school is to perpetuate loyalty to the Emperor.

Tachibana was one of the plotters of the May 15, 1932,
coup d^tat in which Mikami pulled one of the triggers. He
is a lively, bearded old man, and thougjh he also denies any
interest in terrorism, he is potentially one of the strongest
figures in the philosophical reorientation of Japanese nation-
alism. He is a scholar and a poet. He knows Bergson's Crea-
tive Evolution and Frazers Golden Boagk/TThere's a book,*
he says, referring to the latter. "Frazer brought tears to iny

206

eyes when lie mentioned so scientifically the man-god reali-
zation.

"I am a loyalist, not a terrorist," he adds. "It is difficult for
you naive Americans to make a clear-cut distinction between
the two, or even between a rightist, an ultranationalist, and
a patriot. But to the Japanese there is a distinct difference. I
am a loyalist and a loyalist is a patriot. We loyalists believe in
being loyal to the Emperor and to the Imperial Way."

Tachibana went on to explain, that he resorted to terrorism
in 1932 because "the government was corrupt. The zaibatsu
were getting too fat. Industry was monopolistic and the poor
farmers were in dire straits. That is why my forces joined
the coalition. We represented the farmers, who are the bulk
and the backbone of the country. I wanted to rescue agricul-
ture and reconstruct the country as an agrarian state with
the farmers and the common soldiers as the main foundation.
Most of the soldiers were being recruited, anyway, from the
farms. I did not hate Prime Minister Inukai, personally. I
knew him and respected ^1'. But his government was bad,
and we could not tolerate any further his policy. I felt sorry
for him, but he had to be sacrificed."

While young army and navy officers like Mikami were
assigned to the assassination, Tachibana came to Tokyo from
Mito that fateful Sunday morning with twelve young civilian
followers, whose assignment was to blow up the power
plants. They were not so successful.

"Weren't you afraid, trying to tackle the Tokyo police
with so few men?" an American friend of mine asked
Tachibana.

**Afraid? You naive Americans," he replied, shaking his
lean, bearded head. "Whenever a Japanese is entrusted with
such a mission there is no thought of fear. In fact there is no
fear. The mind is in a subconscious state."

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 207

Mikami and Tachibana are friends, and when Tachibana
was released from prison a few years after the revolt, Mikami,
who is a talented artist, visited his home and drew a portrait
of the Buddhist saint Dharma on one of the sliding paper
walls of Tachibana's living room. Mikami also inscribed the
painting with the following traditional sentiment, which the
two men still share in common:

Heaven and Earth, sublime and pure,

Is here in our land of the Gods,
And like Fuji superior among mountains,

Scatters Uke the Banda cherry blossoms
And flows around the Eight Islands of Jamato.

Tachibana disagrees with Mikamf s scheme for a new try
at Pan-Asia. That is a thing of the past, 9 * he says. ""We must
discard theory and accept historical realization. But we can
still attract China to our side, by offering her the things she
lacks and is desperately in need of."

Japan will trade with Red Chfna, and there is nothing we
can do to prevent it ILS. ambassadors who go to Japan
these days almost always begin their tours of duty by duti-
fully warning the Japanese that they should not, of course,
think of trading with our enemy, Red China. The Japanese po-
litely applaud the sentiments. But they cannot live on them,
and in the absence of any other alternative from us they can
only proceed with their plans to find markets, anywhere they
can. Before the war, approximately half of Japan's trade was
with the HTiirta mainland. Today, deprived of her other out-
lets and forced to look around for some means of feeding
herself, Japan has also began to talk of trading with Russia
coal in exchange for fishing equipment, for example. There is
nothing we can do about that either, unless we are prepared
to sustain Japan's economy all by ourselves.

208

Surrounded by water and possessing almost no food other
than fish and rice, and with no raw materials for production
other than water power and plenty of cheap labor, Japan
must trade in order to stay alive. After the war we broke up
the huge trade combines like Mitsui and Mitsubishi and other
zaibatsu organizations, and told the Japanese they would
have to get along without such powerful monopolistic de-
vices. We ordered the combines dissolved, their stocks sold
to the public, and then we drew up regulations stipulating
that no new trade organization could hire more than one
hundred former employees in any one firm. Our motive was
the same as it was elsewhere in the occupation: to destroy all
vestiges of former nationalism and all organizations which
had contributed to Japan's war effort.

But, as happened elsewhere in the occupation, our efforts,
well intentioned as they might have been, were doomed to
failure. The zaibatsu had served a useful and even necessary
purpose, and Japanese economy could not have existed with-
out them. For Japan is a nation of small industries. Much of
the manufacturing is let out, in piecework assignments, to
individual families who clutter up their cottages with spin-
ning wheels, looms, and pottery kilns. They receive their raw
materials from a central company like Mitsui and when
their work is finished it is picked up by the company and
sold. There is no other channel, except through some giant
network like Mitsui with its branch offices and its thousands
of experienced, shrewd operatives all over the world-
through which agrarian Japan, with her necessarily primitive
industries and her eager but naive little businessmen, can
peddle her wares abroad and receive her raw materials from
abroad. The zaibatsu combines provided a feudal arrange-
ment, and, because we did not fully understand their func-
tion, they were bound to go. But now that Japan is on her

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 209

own again the practice is being restored. Purchases, sales,
tariff, and financial arrangements of all kinds can best be
handled by efficient merchant organizations which have
overseas experience. The individual Japanese merchant or
industrialist cannot handle the job alone. Outfits like Mitsui
and Mitsubishi, which can function efficiently because they
work on a mass-market level, are coming back into promi-
nence. And if they find their best trade channels opening
up in the direction of China and Russia, they will fin them.
They cannot do otherwise, unless Japan is to starve. And a
starving Japan, regardless of her conservative nature, prob-
ably would go Communist.

There is another important pressure on Japan, and on our
record there, which bears watching. Hie Japanese, who
love children and also, apparently, the act of creating them,
are reproducing themselves at the rate of about one million
little Japanese a year. Stacked up on those rocky islands,
where there are not enough houses^ jobs, and paddy fields to
go around right now, these extra months and hands will
become a serious problem. If the trading falls off, if the peo-
ple get hungry for rice, if there is a major collapse in Japan's
economy and morale, and if men like Taloi Mikami hit just
the right note on their brooding flutes, there is no telling
what kind of explosion wiH take place in Japan within the
next ten years. Despite her present pacifism, Japan may once
again find the pressure of necessary conquest difficult to
resist.

We were offered an opportunity to make a dent in this
problem, but we did not take ft.

Mrs. Shidzue Kato, who is the former Baroness Ishimoto
and Japan's own version of Margaret Sanger, told me oee
day of how she thought we had missed our big chance. Mrs.
Kato had met Mrs. Sanger years before the war, and they

210

had continued to correspond. Mrs. Sanger had even stopped
off in Japan once to help organize a local birth control move-
ment. Then came the war. The Japanese army, which wanted
young men by the thousands, naturally frowned on the
baroness* attempt to tamper with its supply. She was forced
to cease her work, and it was not until the occupation began
that she was able to try it again. This time the odds were in
her favor. The Japanese are as aware of their problem of
overpopulation as we are. In fact some communities have
a high rate of abortion. And the Japanese had also made
primitive stabs at birth control. But they needed help and
advice.

The climate was fine for such a program. The Japanese
people had lost the war and they were anxious to try any
sensible panaceas we suggested to them which might help
prevent another one. The baroness who had remarried and
was later to become a Diet member, as was her husband-
asked SCAP for permission to leave Japan and visit the U.S. to
re-establish liaison with Mrs. Sanger and learn the latest tech-
niques for teaching birth control. But SCAP refused Mrs.
Kato's request. Mrs. Kato got the impression that General
MacArthur was reluctant to become involved in a program
which might receive serious criticism from political and re-
ligious groups in America. She pleaded that, if she could
not go to America, Mrs. Sanger be brought to Japan. Again
SCAP refused permission.

Mrs. Kato did not give up. Arming herself with booklets
and cutaway models of the female organs, she went from
house to house to demonstrate to anxious mothers how they
might lighten their burden of child-rearing. But it was a
losing battle. She could talk to only a few women a day, and
there were millions who never saw her. The Japanese govern-
ment might have helped, but since it was government prac-

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 211

tice even in those days not to begin any reform unless it was
told to do so by SCAP, Tokyo dragged its feet and the
educational program failed to catch on. In some isolated com-
munities Mrs. Kato's disciples are making slow headway.
Even the midwives, once they learn the importance of birth
control to Japan's future prosperity, volunteer to spread
the gospel at the expense of their own careers. But even so,
there are more babies born daily than there are mothers who
can be reached in the remote villages and persuaded to slow
down. Had our occupation leadership been more courageous
in Japan and less preoccupied with political ambitions in the
U.S., we could have helped solve the one key problem in
that crowded land which has a bearing on every other prob-
lem, from food to militarism.

In Fukuoka one summery day, I sat on the floor in a Japa-
nese room overlooking a canal which ran under a curved
Japanese bridge. Bright yellow and blue advertising banners
whipped in the breeze and tugged at their bamboo staffs.
Overhead, American jets screamed through the air after tak-
ing off from a nearby U.S. defense base. A Japanese news-
paper editor sat cross-legged on the floor next to me and as he
ladled out our lunch of Japanese chowder we talked about
the future of Japan. He was optimistic.

"MacArthur gave us a kind of democracy/' he said, "but
it was a textbook variety. It was not something we won, as
you won yours, by bloodshed. It was a pattern which you
imposed upon us, not one which grew from our roots. We
need a democracy of passion, one we have fought for and
which we can call our own. But we will have to fight for it.
We will have to fight both those people on the far left and
those on the far right. It will be a fight full of bloody riots,
police repression, and violence. It will temporarily stifle our

212

young, struggling democratic elements. But it will show
Japan's health and vigor, nevertheless. Do not be discouraged
by it. If it comes, it will prove that our future is promising.
Because, in order to acquire democracy, we must pass
through this crisis, this struggle between two opposite poles.
And no matter what form we take in the future, it will at least
be something made of our own passion and blood. It will be
a revolution that will last/*

It was a sincere statement, and I wish I could endorse it.
But I am afraid most of the evidence fails to support the
editor's optimism. The Japanese themselveswho must live
within the limits of their own character and experience are
already having to undo many of the patterns we thrust upon
them. They are undergoing a revolution all right, and it will
probably last. But it will not result in a "democracy."

The zaibatsu whom we broke up are re-forming their
ranks. The thought-control police work once again for the
government in camouflaged agencies, to keep an eye on
both the rightists and the Reds. The kimono is coming back to
replace the Western blouse. Women have lost all but a hand-
ful of their seats in the Diet The swordmakers, whose art we
banned because it smacked of chauvinistic fanaticism, are
relighting their charcoal forges to beat out the blades of
shiny steel which serve, even to the most unwarlike Japanese,
as the symbols of their religious faith and racial invincibility.
Kabuki, the national theater, which stages fantastically in-
tricate and beautiful productions of dancing, acting, and
pantomime the strongest, most fascinating theater I have
seen anywhere packs the house whenever its program lists
one of the old classic melodramas involving such ancient and
tear-jerking virtues as filial piety, national honor, and gentle-
manly suicide. Samurai movies, full of charging horses and
swashbuckling swordsmen, are replacing the mushy love

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 213

stories built around Japanese imitations of the American kiss.

Even the Emperor is the prisoner and the victim of ancient
ideals. When his beloved brother, the athletic Prince Chi-
chibu, lay dying of hepatitis, the Emperor rose in the dark of
night and prepared to visit his brother's deathbed. But the
court attendants, who are responsible to the Japanese govern-
ment, forbade Hirohito's short journey on the grounds that
it would "violate tradition" and that it was unseemly for the
Emperor of Japan to indicate in public such human frailty as
sorrow.

It was not until after Chichibu's funeral that the nation
learned of their beloved Prince's own struggle with Japan's
rigid code. Though he had also been ill of tuberculosis and
had once requested modern surgery, the Prince had been
denied that too regardless of the fact that it might have
helped save his life on the grounds that it was unseemly for
an imperial Japanese prince to bow to modern medicine. In
his will, however, Chichibu got revenge on his stubborn court
jailers. He stipulated that his remains should be submitted to
autopsy for the good of modern medicine and that he be
cremated, rather than buried, as is the imperial custom. The
court officials balked, but Princess Chichibu forced them to
carry out her husband's last wishes. The nation, which
learned of all this through the palace grapevine, was proud of
a Prince who was brave enough to defy the "undemocratic"
forces of Japan which they, the little people, could not and
cannot defy.

I once stood about fifteen feet from the Emperor, and saw
how much of a prisoner he is himself. The occasion was the
celebration, in the Imperial Plaza, of the third anniversary of
Japan's constitution. Only two days before, the pitched battle
of May Day, 1952, had been fought over the same plaza.
Cordons of helmeted police and soldiers fenced the area.

214

And only invited guests top-hatted Japanese functionaries
and their wives were allowed near the stands. The Emperor
came on the stage, accompanied by his Empress, and read an
imperial rescript congratulating the nation on its new life.
When he was finished, the crowd of stately officials broke
into the traditional three banzais, and the Emperor acknowl-
edged each one with the customary wave of his top hat.
Then, just as he turned to depart, the crowd sent up another
loud and spontaneous banzai. It was an unprecedented act,
and it meant that the people were so sincerely happy and
proud that they could not resist honoring their Emperor with
their feelings. Hirohito was visibly moved by the salute, and
he turned back to face the crowd. His lips moved with emo-
tion, and he raised his hat a few inches as if to return the
salute. But he thought better of it, and lowered the hat again.
One could sense the doubt in his mind: this was an unprece-
dented occasion, for which there were no ancient, prescribed
rules. What was he to do? He raised the hat again, then
lowered it. He turned as if to go, then turned back again and
faced his people. He wanted so much to thank them and to
reach out to them. He raised the hat once more, but still not
in full salute. The hat shook in the Emperor's nervous hand
and the Emperor himself shivered with emotion. Finally his
chief court chamberlain, the man who tells him daily and al-
most hourly what he can and cannot do, came up to hi and
with gentle but firm motions shoved the Emperor off the
stage before he had a chance to make up his mind. As he left,
the people bowed solemnly.

A few days later, presumably at the behest of the Yoshida
government, Emperor Hirohito performed another chore.
The San Francisco treaty with Japan bad already been signed
and officially the occupation was over and Japan had her
freedom. But the act was not official to most Japanese until

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 215

the Emperor made a long and tiresome pilgrimage to the na-
tional shrine at Ise, where his ancestors are commemorated.
There he walked through the stately trees to the shrine and
informed the heavenly gods in a prayer that Japan was free
at last. That trip alone was enough to make the democratic
elements of Japan shudder. "Good-by, democrassy," said one
Japanese student when he heard the news. Japan was once
again a Shinto society, in which its ancient gods even had to
be let in on contemporary history before the history was con-
sidered to be in effect.

The middle-of-the-road Japanese who could stand against
this sort of regression are weak and divided in their strength.
The Socialist Party, which is the most liberal and democrati-
cally inclined party in Japan, is helplessly split into a radical
wing and a conservative wing. Only by uniting its forces
could it put up a solid front against the government's present
anti-labor, anti-democratic measures. But in the Diet the
Socialists only fight among themselves. They seem incapable
of uniting.

Labor itself, though it numbers today some 7,000,000 or-
ganized workers, is equally schizophrenic in its leadership,
and it lacks political effectiveness commensurate with its size.
Organized labor tried, for example, to fight the anti-subver-
sive bill, fearing that the bill would one day be used against
labor. But one faction wanted to hit the bill hard before it
could be passed. And the other faction, more cautious,
thought it better strategy to avoid antagonizing the govern-
ment with a "political" strike, let the bill pass, and then fight
it. Consequently the bill was passed and labor has been un-
able ever since to get a foothold against the government. This
was bad tactics, but typical of a people who have yet to learn
the art of political procedure.

Minoru Takano, a mild, thoughtful little man who con-

216

scientiously limits himself to three cups of sake at dinner and
sounds more like a professor than a union leader, is boss of
Sohyo, Japan's largest (4,000,000 members) labor federation.
Takano, like the editor in Fukuoka, is an optimist He thinks
that his group can hold on, despite the present weakness in
the liberal, democratic center, and that eventually labor will
be able, almost by itself, to preserve democracy in Japan
against inroads from both left and right.

Takano spent six years in prison before the war because, as
a pioneer labor leader, he refused to knuckle under to the
wartime jingoists. He does not think that fascism of that
variety will ever return to Japan. His own hunch is that the
present conservative government will fail to solve the eco-
nomic and moral crisis facing Japan and that it will eventu-
ally fail. Then, says Takano, Japan will be governed for per-
haps ten years by a weak coalition of splinter parties. During
that period, he adds, labor will grow strong enough to weld
together a really democratic group and form a lasting govern-
ment. It will take time, he admits. But he is confident of the
day when, in the words of a Japanese proverb, his people can
take their turn "pulling the ox by the nose."

His task, which seems to me almost impossible of fulfill-
ment, was not made any easier by our own occupation.

In many ways, of course, our occupation was a success: we
acted as a catalyst and a rallying point for the weak, scattered
elements which already existed in Japan; and we served as a
shield of hope while all the frightened little people the
women, the laborers, the fanners, and the students came out
of their shells and tried to give their country a new and ad-
venturous way of life. In some respects these people suc-
ceeded. None of our ideas will ever be entirely forgotten.
And many of them, once the Japanese have found a way of

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 217

making them their own, will live on and be a credit to our
inspiration.

But we tried to do too much. In our idealistic zeal to show
Japan where she had erred and how she really ought to live,
we tried to make her over in our own image. This was a naive
attempt, foolish and even arrogant in its scope. And it was
doomed, because of its unfortunate pretentiousness, at least
to partial failure. It is a lesson, perhaps, which we needed to
learn: we have a wonderful system, and the world is awed
by it; but the system will not always work in alien soil. As
good as our way of life is for us, there are valid reasons why
other people do not crave it and cannot adapt it to them-
selves.

If it had not been for the Korean war, our experiment
might have been more successful. But only ten short months
after we took over we were forced by sudden circumstances
of defense and power politics to change our signals. We had
unleashed the forces of labor and told them to organize a
strong bulwark of freedom. But when Japanese kbor an-
nounced its first strikes, in an effort to consolidate its skimpy
gains, MacArthur ordered them canceled, on the grounds that
a stable Japanese economy was more important just then
than a strong labor movement. SCAP had directives from
Washington to "permit and favor" changes in the Japanese
form of government, even if these changes involved the use
of force by the Japanese as they tried to reach a democratic
balance. But the occupation was not a year old before Ameri-
can MPs were being used to break up protest meetings and
an American major was ruling Japanese newspapers and in-
forming them that freedom of the press did not include free-
dom to criticize SCAP policies. We had the Japanese write
into their constitution an article renouncing war; then we
asked them to start rearming. In the light of the Russian

218

threat to the north and Japan's northern islands are only a
stone's throw from Russia's southern islands these were un-
derstandable and even necessary moves. But to many con-
fused Japanese they seemed selfish and heartless, and our
growing unpopularity in Japan began when the Japanese
realized not only that the honeymoon was over but that they
were supposed to start washing our dishes, besides.

In short, we preached "democracy'* but we practiced at
times the same kind of government the Japanese had known
all along: rule by edicts, pronounced and enforced by a
strong, heroic, military man who tolerated no argument and
no give-and-take. It is a wonder the Japanese learned as
much as they did.

The occupation has long since been oven We can no longer
give orders. But we can, and should, do all we can to en-
courage the friends we left behind. For if the experiment fails
completely and we started it we have lost the best and only
solid opportunity we shall ever have in Asia to show that we
have more to offer than promises and warnings, and that we
want more from this world than merely a free place to park
our planes, dock our ships, and bunk our soldiers.

Psychologists who have studied the Japanese character
think they probably lack the moral drive necessary to stand
in the center of the street and fight for freedom against
people attacking them from both the left and the right. They
have no religious or philosophical background for such a posi-
tion. They are more likely to drift over to one side of the
street or the other and stay there. And they will go to which-
ever curb has the most people on it. As it looks now, the curb
on the right will be jammed. But if everyone goes there, that
is precisely where we came in, on December 7, 1941. If a
good number go instead to the opposite curb, then that is
what we are fighting now. Either way Japan presents a prob-

SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY 219

lem. The U.S. is not too popular out there just now. We were
kind and well meaning, but we were also naive. And we have
overstayed our welcome. Already our armed forces are find-
ing it necessary to make themselves as inconspicuous as pos-
sible by hiding our troops in remote barracks. Japanese inn-
keepers, who were once happy to see our soldiers, are now
finding it expedient to give their rooms to steady Japanese
customers whose country, after all, it is. We are hated by only
a minority. But with the rest of the people we are becoming
more and more a group of unwanted and rather bothersome
guests. They would like to have us go away just as we would
like to have them go away had the tables been turned.

Somehow, if we are not to lose all face in Asia, we must
find a way to prove to the Japanese that our interest in them
lies deeper than our naval moorings at Yokosuka and farther
afield than the air bases at Tachikawa, Itami, and Itazuke.
(We might begin, whether our West Coast Senators like it or
not, by buying their tuna. It is a small thing, but in Japan our
tariff policy looms large against us. )

If it is "an immutable truism that sound ideas cannot be
stopped," it is also a truism, immutable or otherwise, that the
nation with the best intentions and the most enlightened
ideas in the world cannot always make them stick on alien
soil. When East meets West, in the charged atmosphere of
this century at least, it is often necessary, in peaceful pursuits
as in warfare, to take a substitute for victory.