War in Korea
By PETERFLEMING
THE cautious optimism with which, last week, I assessed the tactical situation in Korea, has been more than justified by events, and my forecast that, nevertheless, the news during the intervening days would be " both confused and bad " has turned out, happily, to be nonsense. The news has been good, and hardly confused at all. I could, however, if I were a charlatan, claim to have been clairvoyant about Inchon, for I suggested the desirability of developing an amphibious threat to this port near Seoul, and the Spectator was hardly upon your breakfast tables when General MacArthur announced that a South Korean force, covered by the Royal Navy, had landed on an island 30 miles from Inchon. Two further landings on other islands closer inshore have since been made and a raid has been carried out in the area by Royal Marines from one of H.M. ships. Whether all this is a feint or not one can only guess. Perhaps it would be over-ingenious to connect it with the reported removal, last Sunday, from Taegu of all the telephone and teletype equipment allotted to the Press on the grounds that these amenities were needed elsewhere. They could only be needed else- where to ensure adequate coverage of a major amphibious operation, and the incident is therefore susceptible of two alternative interpre- tations on the evidence available. These are: (a) the Americans are about to carry out a major amphibious operation, couldn't lay their hands on any spare equipment for the correspondents accredited to the force involved and overlooked the fact that to uproot the existing equipment from within the bridgehead " for use elsewhere " would give a wide measure of publicity to their intentions, or (b) the Americans are not yet in a position to carry out a major amphibious operation but wish to give, as unmistakably as possible, the impres- sion that they are about to launch one. I bet on (b), and if I win must modify last week's criticisms of General MacArthur's neglect of strategic deception.
The front has held throughout the week. There have been awkward moments in some sectors, and local penetrations have led to the establishment of road-bloCks in the rear of American units. But, as has been pointed out more than once in these articles, a road-block is not much good unless the troops who man it have enough supporting weapons to out-shoot the forces brought against them, and the Americans now have the guns and the armour to eliminate these alarming but vulnerable phenomena before they can be built up into a serious threat. Most of the North Korean bridgeheads over the Naktong appear, at the time of writing, to have been erased or reduced to negligible dimensions ; and Taegu, with its exceedingly important air-strip, looks reasonably safe. South Koreans have restored the situation at Pohang and in a northward advance of several miles have had their first real taste of victory and taken much booty.
The sector west of Pusan, where the North Koreans are keeping up strong pressure on American positions covering Masan, is still the main potential source of danger ; and if anything went wrong here there might be an awkward situation in the American base area. But I do not think it would be anything worse than an awkward situation. It would be premature to say that the Americans have wrested the initiative from the North Koreans, but it really does begin to look as if the latter have lost, not only momentum, but hitting-power. They can gain successes, but they can no longer exploit them with the speed and assurance which they once showed. They have had very heavy losses both in men and equipment and, though they are wonderfully tough, there can be very few com- manders at any level (or soldiers, for that matter) who are not feeling the effects of fatigue and strain.
It looks, in other words, as if the 8th Army, by a fine display of doggedness and endurance, have saved the situation by a. narrow margin ; and by the time the British brigade group (which will, it is said, be brought up to strength by a battalion of Australian volunteers from Japan and may in time form the nucleus of an Imperial Division) arrives in Korea next month the United Nations should be in a position to pass to the counter-offensive. On the mounting of this small British force my valued colleague Strix makes elsewhere some comments with which I cannot but associate myself. I hope, incidentally, that arrangements will be made with General MacArthur for a British briefing officer to be attached to his public relations staff, not to hog any of the limelight for the British contingent, but simply to be able to interpret its composition and conduct to curious correspondents. The organisation, the terminology and above all the slang of the British and American armies differ considerably and misunderstandings are always liable to arise. I remember a distinguished American officer in the last war illustrating this by recalling a last-minute conference at an Allied headquarters on the eve of an operation. " What about the move of the Umpteenth Division ? " asked an American General. " Oh, that's all tied up, sir," replied a British officer rather languidly. " Then for Pete's sake go and get it untied," cried the American in some consternation. " If that Division doesn't sort itself out and get cracking the operation's off."
A question which needs considering—and considering in Washington rather than in Tokyo—is the American bombing policy on both sides of the 38th Parallel. The American heavy bomber force has hitherto been employed intermittently, but not at all ineffectually, against industrial targets in North Korea and it has sometimes intervened in the area of operations. These industrial targets give the impression of being a pis aller. The Army has been in difficulties, the Air Force is there to support it: therefore the Air Force must unleash its considerable striking power upon the enemy. But you could not, or you could only very seldom, employ Super-Fortresses against the scattered groups of infantry who were responsible for the Eighth Army's predicament. So " strategic " targets in the North were attacked in the hope that the damage inflicted on them would eventually lead to a deteriora- tion of the enemy's supply position in the South.
This, of course, must be the effect produced eventually, and perhaps it is being produced already. But Washington has said that it expects the war in Korea to be over by February and Pyongyang has said that 12,000 civilians have been killed: and in the light of these two statements, and of the improvements in the 8th Army's fortunes, it would appear—even if one looks at the question from a purely materialistic and not from an ethical point of view—that the American bombing policy needs to be recon- sidered. These " strategic " raids may not be, in intention, indis- criminate, but the policy which initiates them bears an unattractive resemblance to Japanese bombing policy in China, which was always ready to inflict the maximum amount of human suffering in return for small and hypothetical military gains.
The American bomber fleet in the Far East is growing in strength, and its commander, General Stratemeyer (who, if I may say so without disrespect, is not an officer who could ever be criticised for being over-imaginative), would be less than human if he did not seize every opportunity of employing his forde offensively ; but it seems possible that the law of diminishing returns has already begun to operate, and that the difficulties which strategic bombing is piling up for the future are out of proportion to the advantages which the United Nations Forces are deriving from it now. Wash- ington must make up its mind what it wants the condition of the Peninsula to be when the artificial and universally unpopular frontier on the 38th Parallel has been restored. The South will be ruined and devastated. Will it make things easier if all the cities of the North are reduced to rubble and the bitterness of the population correspondingly increased ? This question is not an easy one to answer, and the problem which it represents is a grim as well as a tricky one to have to solve.
The Spectator has received indications that some readers believe this series of articles to have been written from the theatre of operations. This, I am afraid, has, not been the case. They were all composed in the offices of the Spectator. None will appear in the next two issues, as the writer is going on what—with that sturdy insistence on the use of obsolescent military terms which is the hallmark of the armchair strategist—he prefers to describe as furlough.
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