Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war: McCarthyism, Korea, and other nightmares

Monthly Review, April, 1997 by Doug Dowd

- Allen Ginsberg, "Howl"

The college students of the 1950s were characterized - and reproached - as "the silent generation." There was, to be sure, a certain kind of silence; but, as one who was teaching during those years either in California or New York, I remember it as mysterious, the quasi-silence of a simmering pot.

There was substantial reason for students (among others) to simmer and smoke: the decade of the 1950s was rife with enormous changes demanding discussion and protest, but they were also years in which discussion and protest were punished in punishing ways. They were the years par excellence of McCarthyism and the simultaneous escalation of the cold war, at home and abroad.

The years from 1945 through 1952, the Truman era, were those in which it seemed that through a mad magician's sleight of hand a victorious, immeasurably strong and free nation found itself ensnared by an Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations, a Presidential Loyalty Review Board, purges of "reds" in the entertainment industry, the renewed military draft, a war as bloody in its effects as it was mystified in its origins and name (a "United Nations Police Action") in Korea, and, neither last nor least, loyalty oaths in unions and universities.

Into the Valley of Death

The seemingly endless horror of the war in Vietnam - the longest ever, and the most clearcut defeat for the United States - has allowed the much briefer but even more murderous Korean war to slip from popular memory,(1) as regards its origins, its nature, and its consequences. Yet it may be asserted that had it not been for the Korean war, and the McCarthyism and agitation over the Chinese revolution that accompanied and intensified it, the war in Indochina (and much else) would have been a lot less likely.(2)

Korea was the first hot war of the cold war, and it was very hot indeed: its death toll remains by far the largest of the period, it took the world closer to nuclear conflagration than ever since (even including the 1962 Cuban missile crisis), and its ramifications seem to be endless.

The formal war lasted three years, from June 1950 into July 1953. Like the war in Vietnam, it was a civil war; and both wars required a massive involvement of U.S. troops and weaponry if the civil war was not to be quickly won by "the other side."(3)

Let us look first at the devastation the war caused in Korea, and then ask how and why it began, and why it was so ferocious.

The total number of people killed was almost certainly well over 3 million - possibly more like 4 million - in a nation whose population was some 30 million when the war started. Although these figures may seem high, if one takes into account the almost unbelievable intensity of the bombing, the shortage of medical facilities, the lack of food and the extreme cold and lack of shelter in the context of a scorched-earth policy and the systematic destruction of livestock, they are not implausible. By far the largest number died in North Korea.... Our estimate is that over 2 million North Korean civilians died and about 500,000 North Korean soldiers. In addition, some 1 million Chinese soldiers probably died (although one first- hand Chinese source has put the figure at 3 million). South Korean civilian deaths were about 1 million; Southern battle-related deaths were some 47,000; non-battle-related military deaths were probably higher. US deaths are put at 54,246, of whom 33,629 were "battle deaths." The total number of battle deaths among other forces came to 3,194....(4)

From the beginning, General Douglas MacArthur was in charge of the U.S. (or, as it was called the "U.N.") effort.(5) He was removed by President Truman in April of 1951 for his headstrong interpretation of his powers (and refusal to see Truman as Commander-in-Chief), and his clear intent to carry the war into and over the skies of China by any means possible.(6) There were still two years of intensive ground fighting, conventional and napalm bombing, and naval shelling to be endured when MacArthur observed (in 1951, before Congress):

The war in Korea has almost destroyed that nation. I have never seen such devastation. I have seen, I guess, as much blood and disaster as any living man, and it just curdled my stomach the last time I was there. After I looked at that wreckage and those thousands of women and children and everything, I vomited. (Halliday and Cumings, op. cit., p. 152)

MacArthur had only seen the South. The North was bombed and burned much worse, and much worse was on its way. Item: up to the last days of the war, the U.S. Navy shelled the northern coastal city of Wonsan twenty-four hours a day uninterruptedly for 861 days. (During most of the period, peace negotiations were going on.) Item: Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, was reduced to something less than rubble; photographs of it in 1953 seem to be of Hiroshima. Item: in the last year of the war, the main hydroelectric dams providing most of the North's electric power were blasted to uselessness. Item: napalm, much of it manufactured in Japan, was being dropped ceaselessly on villages throughout the North for three years, leaving nothing of life behind.(7)