The Korean War: The Untold Truth

Chapter 105 Open the secret (6)
Although the Republicans held Bradley for another two days, Toby's point was taken seriously on the grounds that MacArthur had broken the rules both on the issue of the ultimatum urging surrender and on the Martin letter, and that Truman It was also within the purview of his mandate to dismiss him. As soon as the session began on May 5, Republicans began work on wrapping up the hearings.Senator Burke Hickenlooper proposed that the chiefs of staff of the armed forces not be called in to testify in person, but that they should look at previous testimony and say whether they agreed with it.Hickenlooper felt that asking the military to testify again would be repetitive, and he wanted to move on to the more vulnerable target of Dean Acheson, but Senator Russell objected.Republicans have been so vocal in their calls for hearings that they have no qualms about denouncing the administration, using words like "totally defeated."Russell was unforgiving.The committee is to stay until every relevant witness has been heard.

The Democratic majority wants to prolong the hearing for no other reason.One means of allaying public indignation is to make them intolerable with a subject they are already tired of.For three weeks, the "MacArthur Hearings" had dominated news coverage, so much so that the American public was ready to turn to summer vacations and baseball games.

Acheson testifies in court

When Secretary of State Dean Acheson appeared as a witness, Republicans saw an opportunity to take on the administration's lucrative take on the fall of China.It was an unshakable Republican credo that, at best, it was Truman's incompetence; or at worst, Communist spies manipulated the State Department so that Chiang Kai-shek lost to the Communists.Thus, Acheson will spend the longest time of any witness before the committee—from 6:1 a.m. on Friday, June 10 to 06:6 p.m. on Saturday, June 9.In the first two days, Acheson endured various rambling and unstructured questions. At one time, he was asked to repeatedly list the process of various events that led to MacArthur's dismissal, and at another time, he was asked to explain various memorandums of the State Department.

But Acheson managed to make the point he had hoped for: that doing things according to MacArthur's plan would risk the United States being drawn into a war with no strategic merit.The Soviets are likely to come out to help the Chinese according to their mutual aid treaty, otherwise they will lose face as the leader of the communist world.

However, Acheson's most important speeches were delivered to the Chinese and North Koreans beyond the senators.Over the past few weeks, the government has lost faith in the United Nations as a bargaining forum to end the war.Acheson and others believed that it was too unreliable and unpredictable as the agency for coordinating peace talks.The divergence of views among UN member states means that the United States risks being forced to accept unsatisfactory terms for peace.The United States has decided to take a different approach, with the goal of stopping the fighting, even under less-than-ideal conditions.

Acheson used the Senate hearings as a megaphone to present America's greatly reduced war goals to the Communist Party.The United States no longer insists on completing the long-standing UN mission of reunifying Korea. Although reunification of Korea still exists as a long-term goal, the United States is willing to end the war under other conditions.If the Communist Party can give the United States an assurance that there will be no further hostilities against South Korea, the United States will accept a ceasefire at the [-]th parallel and agree to withdraw all foreign forces (i.e. United Nations forces) from the war on the condition that the foreign forces ( i.e. the Chinese) are also leaving North Korea.In effect Acheson was telling the communists that they could stop fighting if they wanted to.

While he did not explicitly acknowledge that the United States had lowered its war goals, he took pains to explain at length why Washington was now willing to end the war under conditions that reflected the conditions in which it began.

Pushing the Chinese back to the [-]th parallel would contain "communist imperialism" and make it impossible for the invaders on both sides to win.True, the war does not necessarily end.But continuing the war on a smaller front would be easier and cost less in human life than the extended war MacArthur sought.Even if the war continued, it would not guarantee "victory", but it would bring great risks to the allies through which the United States hoped to contain the expansion of communism around the world.To ask the Allies to take part in such a dangerous enterprise as the war in China places an unjust burden upon them.Acheson explained:

We cannot expect our collective security system to last long if we take steps that place unnecessary and dangerous threats to the people who are part of it with us. …

The strength of our alliance to deter enemy attack depends in part on the will and mutual trust of our partners.If we undercut such efforts, especially in the North Atlantic region, as suggested, we would jeopardize the security of a region vital to our own national security.

Acheson did not accept MacArthur's view that the war could not be won if it was confined to Korea.In his view, the word "win" is irrelevant. “It doesn’t matter exactly where the war ends. What matters is whether a solution can be achieved in a place where the Chinese don’t want or want to come back to fight?”

Acheson said continued punishment would eventually cause the Chinese to stop fighting.He doesn't want to fight a war of extermination with the Chinese, he hopes to achieve a balance to ensure peace in North Korea.

But Acheson's critics seem unimpressed by his North Korea policy statement, repeatedly returning to the "State Department lost China" issue and implicitly demanding an apology from him on his knees.Acheson defended the government as best he could, but he feared that this complicated matter would be spoiled if "only indiscriminate questions and answers were made on it."So, on the evening of his second day of testimony, he made a counterproposal: Give him a day to prepare as he attempts to make a comprehensive statement on U.S. policy toward China since 1945.The committee agreed, and Acheson collected a thick bundle of State Department papers and returned to his Maryland country farm for the weekend. "With the help of coffee, and the company of my wife in the quiet of the farm house, with a security guard at the door," he exhaustedly plucked out a pile of notes, digging through the files.

On Monday morning, Acheson made an extraordinary three-hour presentation.With the aid of his notes, he recounted the collapse of ancient Chinese society under the onslaught of modernity, as well as the unsuccessful efforts of the United States to mediate between the opposing forces of the Kuomintang and the Communist Party.He categorically denied that the United States had any fault for the downfall of Chiang Kai-shek's government.He said U.S. aid cannot guarantee the survival of any government and can only supplement their own efforts.Nor can the United States make decisions on behalf of another government, even one it intends to save.

Acheson paints a picture of China in 1945 in chaos, a "territory" that was not a country for decades, with the Communists and Soviets controlling the northern provinces and "Manchuria" and the Japanese controlling the big cities and railroads Net, the Kuomintang survived in the southern corner of the country.The realistic conclusion drawn by the U.S. investigation team is that the Kuomintang will have to fight for several more years to drive out the Communist Party, and the hope of victory is slim.General George Marshall served as the President's special envoy in China, where he unsuccessfully tried to negotiate a ceasefire and persuade the KMT to make social and political reforms to gain wider popular support.Both efforts failed.Congress finally passed 4 million U.S. dollars in economic and military aid to the Kuomintang (the government requested 5.7 million U.S. dollars), but did not agree to send military advisers to combat areas. (Acheson tactfully did not say that this reduced aid program was passed by a Republican-controlled Congress elected in 1946.) Even with this aid, the KMT began to experience military collapse in late 1948, It went from a 3-to-1 numerical advantage to a 1-to-1.5 disadvantage.A January 1949 intelligence estimate by the U.S. Army stated that the KMT's military status had "declined beyond repair."General David Barr, head of the US military delegation, said that the leadership of the Kuomintang "is the worst in the world" and that 1% of US military equipment has been lost.The United States decided not to take over the war, and Chiang Kai-shek fell.

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