War in Korea
By PETER FLEMING
ITHINK it was M. Mandel who, when France was falling in 1940, parodied the reassuring announcements made by Government spokesmen with the remark : "De catastrophe en catastrophe nous volons vers la victoire ! " ; and General MacArthur's headquarters continue to sound a note of sturdy confidenee which appears, at the time of writing, to be warranted by few of the facts. The one hopeful development in Korea is the arrival during the last few days of the 1st Marine Division, the 2nd Division and a brigade group which formed part of the occupa- tion forces in the peninsula. More troops are on the way. The 8th Army should now have adequate resources to deal with the most immediate threat to its base, and has already mounted a locally successful counter-attack near Chinju. But further north. an awk- ward situation is developing in the Taegu area, and a sizeable part of the newly-arrived force may have to be diverted to help extricate the American and South Korean forces who have begun to pull back. A small army which has to fight for two entirely different and not easily compatible objects at the same time is always at a disadvan- tage; and the next few days are going to be extremely critical.
The difficulties imposed on the North Korean forces by the momentum of their advance and by the opposition, both from the air and on the ground, which they have encountered have been repeatedly emphasised by staff officers in Washington and Tokyo. This form of whistling in the dark is a normal accompaniment to military defeats all over the world ; and even the British Army, which has been beaten so often that it ought to know better, indulged in it freely during the last war, though not perhaps on the scale tolerated within General MacArthur's command. But the fact that the claims made are strongly influenced by wishful thinking and sometimes, indeed, based on very little else need not obscure the fact that the North Korean Army—like any army en- gaged on any operations—must be facing difficulties and handicaps, some of which may be (and all of which certainly seem to the com- manders who have to overcome them) of considerable importance. It is perhaps worth while speculating a little about these difficulties, and trying to see what they add up to.
Theoretically, far and away the North Koreans' biggest handi- cap—a handicap which in fact made their whole campaign (on paper) a military impossibility, and would doubtless have deterred them from undertaking it at all if only enough of them had been to the Staff College—is the fact that their enemy has undisputed and steadily increasing air supremacy. Quite apart from the material damage done to communications, transport, supply dumps and so on, the scale of air attack to which the North Koreans have been subjected ought to have had locally decisive effects on their morale. By "locally decisive" I do not mean that air attacks on (say) a battalion area ought to have caused the battalion to run away ; but it ought to have got the men's heads down and shaken their nerves and made them ripe for a counter-attac,Ic or anyhow extremely reluctant to move forward until the sound of aircraft engines (which can " freeze " a wide sector of the front if troops are in the mood to be frozen) had died away altogether. This sort of thing does not seem to have happened at all. Admittedly a great deal of move- ment has been carried out by night or under cover of bad weather ; but, generally speaking, the intervention of air forces has never altered the outcome of an action or prevented the hostile infantry from getting on to their objectives. It follows that attacks from the air have missed their most promising target, which was North Korean morale. .
Other targets, of course, they have not missed. Some tanks, some guns, some bridges, a certain amount of rolling stock and a great deal of motor transport have been destroyed ; and a fair number of North Korean soldiers have been killed or wounded. These losses must have worried, must now be worrying, the enemy's Commanders; but some of them have been offset. by material captured from the Americans, and though they are quantitatively
cumulative, it cannot be said with certainty that they are qualitatively so. It is, for instance, obviously a serious thing for a force com- posed mainly of infantry to lose (say) 90 per cent, of its motor transport ; but if it has already advanced 90 per cent. of the distance it intends to advance, and is less than fifty miles from its final objective, the loss is not, for practical purposes, nearly as serious as it sounds.
North Korean prisoners have said that conditions at the front are terrible, discipline is brutal, food is .short and conscripts are being press-ganged ; they have said, in short, all the things their interrogators wanted them to say, which is what Asiatic prisoners very often do. Some of these things may well be true ; but if they were important as well as true, American accounts of the fighting would surely have been less horrific and the rate of the North Koreans' advance slower.
Hospital accommodation, medical supplies, rest. centres, mail, a balanced diet, leave—these are not the sort of things whose virtual non-existence in their administrative arrangements is likely to worry the North Koreans to any noticeable degree. They have a simple but drastic solution for political problems, and are unlikely to 'pe troubled with guerrillas on their lines of communication. From a long-term point of view the bombing of their industrial centres must cause their political leaders some anxiety, but it can hardly affect the course of the present campaign very much. In short, though the difficulties facing the North Koreans must be very great, and though most of them are increasing, it seems improbable that the sum of them can make more than an indirect contribution to the Americans' chances of retaining a bridgehead at Pusan. This can only be done by out-fighting the enemy on the ground, and any more talk about the terrible mess he has got himself into by winning an unbroken series of victories will only exasperate (as it always does) the men who have got to do the fighting.
These articles have to be written on a Wednesday, and a good deal is liable to happen before they reach readers of the Spectator two days later. The situation this week is particularly fluid and critical, and the bowl, crystal, Mk. I, issued to all armchair strategists presents a more than ordinarily turjd appearance. Obviously the 8th Army's most urgent task is to hold, and if possible to throw back, the enemy force which now imminently threatens Pusan front the west. The next most urgent thing to do is to get the two out- lying divisions—the 1st Cavalry and the 25th—back out of the mountains and into the perimeter ; and in this withdrawal, which seems now to be under way, it is highly important from every point of view that the Sooth Korean formations (who have given less ground than the Americans, are therefore out on a longer limb, and have virtually no motor transport) should not be left behind. The threat to Taegu, mentioned earlier in this article, may well turn this withdrawal into a bit of a scramble ; but it seems unlikely that the North Korean forces exerting it are strong enough in sup- porting weapons to interrupt decisively the Americans' main line a communications: though I am afraid that the correspondents will be calling it, with considerable justification, an "escape route" before we are all very much older.
I still think that—as I said last week—the main danger lies in the Americans trying to defend too long a perimeter. Troops on the defensive (this axiom is better expressed in Field Service Regula- tions, but I cannot remember the wording) can hold no more ground by day than they can hold by night, and the longer a perimeter is the more vulnerable it is to infiltration. The Tobruk perimeter was, I think, twenty-five miles long. It was protected by a broad and continuous cordon of minefields, the whole of which was or could be covered by fire, and its normal garrison was one division with a lot of artillery and some armour in support. I have always heard that one of the main reasons why it fell, in the end, so easily was because part of the minefield was lifted when the garrison was relieved, the mines being needed elsewhere. The Americans have, or will have, in Pusan a far stronger garrison than we had in Tobruk, as well as air superiority and undisputed command of the sea (we lacked the first and were therefore denied the second) ; and, though the North Koreans are very brave. theic army can hardly be accounted comparable with the Afrika Korps as a fighting force. They could, all the same, create an awkward and even a disastrous situation if they broke into the perimeter before its defenders had got themselves organised, and this is a danger which cannot be dismissed until—and unless—the situation is stabilised. At a guess I would say that the Americans had a better than even chance of retaining Pusan: but only very slightly better.
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