April 23, 1969

Odds Even For More Korean War

So North Korea shoots down a U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane with 31 Americans on board, and we add one more chapter to the incredible story of a war we blundered into but can't blunder out of.

All indications are that we will be engaged in full scale fighting there before we are through.

We are bluffing in Korea, and the communists know it.  They are calling our hand.  We've got to put up or shut up.

The latest, unprovoked attack on U.S. armed forces is part of a deliberate, if diabolical, plan to drive us out of the strategic peninsula guarding Japan.

Chances are even that the communists will succeed.  They are ready to cash in two decades of appeasement.  We must soon decide whether to give up our ante of 54,000 American dead or match it in hopes of winning the stakes.

What would you do?

North Korean Premier Kim Il Sung ordered his country in October 1966 to prepare for renewal of the war.  He said all of Korea must be united under communist rule by military means.  Since that time provocations have been launched with increasing frequency.

His reasoning is not difficult to follow.

South Korea, under American protection, and with American dollars, is close to becoming economically and militarily self sufficient.  Americans are war weary from the Vietnam struggle and anxious to make an accommodation with the Vietcong.  While this mood prevails, and while we are still tied down in Indochina, the North Koreans have their last and best chance to take over their part of Asia.

Shortly after Sung's pronouncement, the raids across the demilitarized armistice zone began.  The first ambush killed six Americans and one South Korean soldier.

During 1967 the North Koreans killed 131 American and South Korean soldiers and wounded 294 more in assaults along and below the DMZ.  Two American camps were shot up, artillery fire was exchanged, trains and bridges blown up.  At sea, well into South Korean waters, the communists sank an allied patrol boat.

Last year the North Koreans boldly sent a commando force of 31 men into Seoul, capital of South Korea, to assassinate President Park Chung Hee.  The group got within 800 yards of the presidential palace before being discovered.

Two days later, chafing under the failure of the Seoul raid, the U.S.S. Pueblo was captured and hauled into a North Korean port.

These are not incidents of nervous foot soldiers facing each other across a no-mans land.  They are deliberate, flagrant violations of the Korean armistice which are designed to test our will.  The first time we flinch we can be sure a blow to the solar plexus will follow.

How did we get into this mess?

Come back in history with me to 1949 -- a time when Secretary of State Dean Acheson and his "Asian advisor", Owen Lattimore, had convinced us the communists were only "agrarian reformers".

Chiang Kai-shek, president of China, had been forced by the United States to admit communists into his government.  They promptly took over the key offices, started a civil war and drove our Asian friends to the little island of Formosa.

Then began one of the most astounding, inept, stupid blunders in American diplomacy.

On Jan. 5, 1950, President Harry Truman announced that the U.S. would not send military force or military advisors to defend Formosa.

Then, on Jan. 12, Acheson told newspaper executives at the National Press Club in Washington: "For its own security the United States must and shall maintain forces in Japan, the Ryukyu Islands; (Okinawa), and the Philippines.  But no such line of containment could be drawn in southern and southeast Asia, where the United States had no direct responsibilities and only limited opportunities for action."

A few days later Acheson told the, Senate Foreign Relations Committee he, had warned state department officials, abroad "to prepare for the loss of Formosa to the communists," that early recognition of Communist China was "possible," and that "beyond the line laid down (Japan, Okinawa, and the Philippines) the United States could not assure the rest of the Far East against attack."

These were dramatic and far-reaching statements widely publicized in the press.  I remember well the maps carried in newspapers showing the defense line supposedly writing off China, Formosa, Korea and Indochina.

If ever a potential aggressor had an engraved invitation to walk in and take over a helpless country, this was it.  In June the North Koreans marched south.

The communists were the most surprised people in the world when Truman sent troops in to fight on the side of the line he said he wouldn't.  The communists felt double crossed.

The most incredible aspect of Truman's decision, however, was to throw a task force along the south China coast to neutralize military action between the, communists and Chiang Kai-shek.  He made it clear the U.S. ships were equally determined to prevent Chiang from shooting up and blockading mainland China, as they were to stop the communists.

The effect of this order was to free the Reds from military threat.  It was only a matter of time, therefore before they would send their idle troops to join their, comrades in Korea.  Only many American lives, much American money, and a forswearing of victory staved off the combined assault and kept democracy flickering in Asia.

Now we have another task force prowling troubled Asian waters.  Twenty three warships, including three attack carriers, have been dispatched by President Richard Nixon to protect our fighting men in international waters and air space.

There have been restrained statements, but an obvious ultimatum.  The next attack will result in military retaliation.  History has shown that the most likely response to an ultimatum is defiance.

Truman, Acheson and Lattimore botched the Korean problem by failing to make their intentions clear.  Their public declarations fell far short of their private resolve.

We can only hope that Nixon has learned from their mistakes and is prepared to do no more, nor no less, than he announces.

Likewise, we can only hope the communists will be wary of the unpredictable Americans.

Fifty thousand American lives depend on it.

Author: Lindsey Williams