Five decades on: The remaining questions of the Korean War

By Harvey Stockwin

HONG KONG (JP): Fifty years after, in a very real sense the Korean War is still a work in progress. The North Korean dictatorship, now run by Kim Il-sung's son Kim Jong-il, is still reiterating that its aggression was only a counter-attack. even after the recent North-South summit.

The state of war declared by North Korea on June 25 has still not been revoked, a peace treaty has not yet been negotiated, and an uneasy armistice is all that has been attained.

Additionally, we are still trying to find out exactly what happened then and subsequently. There are many ifs, and buts, and maybes, which still need to be unraveled. One institution which is assisting the unraveling is the Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC.

Just surf on the Internet to http://cwihp.si.edu/, then type in "Korean War" on the search engine on the home page of the website -- and find a mass of fascinating material, much of it recently released from Russian archives.

For example, why was it that the North Koreans, having taken the South Koreans completely by surprise, were unable to push forward more speedily than they did -- perhaps making it impossible for the South Koreans and the Americans to retain a foothold on the peninsula around the southern port city of Pusan?

The website contains documentary confirmation of what was asserted in Nikita Khrushchev's sometimes unreliable memoirs. Numerous Soviet military advisers were with the North Korean forces prior to the North Korean attack. They took part in reconnaissance, in planning the attack operation at divisional level, and in the concentration of North Korean forces from June 12 to June 23. One source puts their total number as high as 7,000 advisers.

Just before North Korea was due to invade, the Soviet dictator Stalin ordered all the Russian advisers suddenly withdrawn. He was fearful that some might have been taken prisoner. That would have exposed as a lie his contention then, and subsequently, that the Soviet Union was not behind the North Korean aggression. Stalin was desperately anxious to avoid confrontation with the United States.

But this Russian retreat undoubtedly had an impact on the fighting. Had the Russians stayed, the North Korean advance might have been more ruthless and more effective than it actually was in those crucial opening days and weeks of the Korean War. Then the hot Cold War would have unfolded differently over the last 50 years.

The Korean War would have unfolded differently if the Russian retreat had not been matched by a surprisingly quick United Nations repsonse.

For June 26 and June 27 is the 50th anniversary of the time when the United Nations, set up after World War II to foster collective security, took a forthright stand in support of that ideal.

As slimmed down ceremonies in Seoul on June 25 commemorated the 50th anniversary of the start of the Korean War, the flags of 21 nations were fluttering in the breeze.

It was a reminder of an oft forgotten fact that it was the United Nations which combatted aggression in Korea, and that even today South Korean and United States troops serve together under a United Nations Command, first set up in 1950 within days of the North Korean invasion.

India, together with Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Italy provided medical units to the UNC during the three-year war. Fifteen other nations, apart from the US, provided combat forces in one form or another.

In 1953, Indian additionally supplied custodial forces to the Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission, set up by the armistice, to help sort out the vexed and strife-filled issue of returning prisoners-of-war.

June 26 was the 50th anniversary of a UN report which clearly concluded that the North had invaded the South, thereby making the quick collective effort possible.

How was it that the UN responded so quickly? It is a question that naturally arises 50 years later, as the UN too often takes its own sweet bureaucratic time responding to diverse crises which require peace-keeping or peace-enforcing forces.

One reason was that the Soviet Union was then boycotting the UN Security Council. Moscow's boycott was a protest against the fact that the recently-proclaimed Peoples Republic had not been immediately seated as the representative of China.

The Soviet boycott meant that all the speedy UN resolutions first condemning and then ordering North Korea to vacate its aggression, and then calling upon members of the UN to send forces to resist the invasion, were not vetoed.

Equally important, why was it that the UN was not taken in by the communist claim that South Korea had attacked first? Why did the UN so quickly recognize that the North had invaded the South, rather than the other way around, as communist propaganda, then as now, insisted?

After the US and the Soviet Union both withdrew their forces from Korea in the late 1940s, the UN had earlier been given the impossible task of organizing free elections throughout Korea. Already the UN Commission for Korea (UNCOK) was on the ground in Korea, having only been allowed to help organize elections in the South.

So on June 26, 24 hours after the war started, an UNCOK report arrived in New York for the then UN Secretary General Trygve Lie, stating that North Korea was carrying out "a well-planned, concerted and full scale invasion of South Korea" when "South Korean forces were deployed on a wholly defensive basis in all sectors, and were completely taken by surprise".

Lie's reaction was devastating in its simplicity. "This is a violation of the UN Charter," he said.

Veteran Australian journalist and Asia watcher Denis Warner recently revealed why UNCOK itself was not taken by surprise in a fascinating article in the International Herald Tribune. Two Australian officers, who had been seconded to UNCOK, Maj. Stuart Peach and Squadron Leader Ron Rankin, had been sent to the 38th parallel to observe the tension and the exchanges of fire between North and South Korea.

On June 24, the day before the North Korean attack, they had submitted their first report to UNCOK. In a nutshell, it said the South Korean forces were wholly on the defensive with no massing visible anywhere. The South Koreans were in no position to carry out a large scale attack against the North.

The North Koreans granted no access to the UN observers who could still observe that the North Korean forces were not only massing at some points -- they already occupied salients south of the border.

One salient had only recently been occupied by the North. The South was not making any moves to eject the North from the salients it occupied. The South did not have the armor, the air support or the heavy artillery with which it might have invaded the North -- whereas the North already possessed all three.

The report clearly indicated who was invading whom. Twenty one nations quickly responded to the UN call for forces to halt the North Korean advance. As Warner so aptly concludes, without the UNCOK Peach and Rankin report, the UN response inevitably would have been much slower. The North Koreans would probably then have won the war.