The Ugly War

John Osborne, TIME & LIFE senior correspondent in the Pacific, last week cabled this report from the Korean battlefront :

THIS is a story that no American should ever have to write. It is the ugly story of an ugly war. Because there is so much to tell that is sorrowful and sickening, let the story begin with a few good and heartening things that also can be said about our war in Korea.

The American effort and the American soldier in Korea are magnificent. Doubtless we could and should have been better prepared. But the more important fact is that never before in all our history have we been so nearly prepared at the start of any war as we were at the start of this one. Today we have in Korea more men and more arms than we sent to the invasion of North Africa in November of 1942, eleven months after Pearl Harbor.

Already, though still outnumbered, we have the greater weight of arms, on the ground and in the air and at sea. We know how to use and coordinate the arms, as we did not know for many months after the start of World War II. It is a wonderful and thrilling thing to see, as I have just seen, infantry in action with the support of fighters from the Air Force, bombers from a naval carrier, and, if the field commander had wanted it, bombardment from warships standing offshore.

It is wonderful and thrilling, too, to ride the pipeline into Korea. The EUR-545, the C-46s and 47s stream into the airports of Japan, laden with everything from battlewise noncoms to dismantled artillery.

We might yet be pushed out of Korea. But the buildup of American power has been achieved at a pace and on a scale that would never before have been possible so early in a war so far from home.

How to Live & Die. Then there are the soldiers. They are boys, most of them, in their teens and early 20s, many of them lately trained only in the softening and vitiating duty of the occupation in Japan. They were scared at first. In some places, they abandoned positions that seasoned troops might have held. But in a land and among a people that most of them dislike, in a war that all too few of them understand and none of them want, they became strong men and good soldiers--fast. Quite literally overnight they learned all there is to know about sticking, fighting, killing and dying. The business of soldiers is not to die but to live, and they are learning to do that, too. I have seen boys who by rights should have been freshmen in college transformed by a week of battle into men wise in the terrible ways of this especially terrible war.

I say that this is an especially terrible war. It is so for reasons which every American must understand if we are to grasp the extent, the nature and the immense complexities of our problem in Asia. Much of this war is alien to the American tradition and shocking to the American mind. For our men in Korea are waging this war as they are forced to wage it and as they will be forced to wage any war against the Communists anywhere in Asia.

Our soldiers will continue to be forced to war in this fashion--until our political and military leaders acquire and apply an understanding of war in Asia that they have not as yet displayed in Korea. Above all, our leaders must grasp one quite simple fact: war against the Communists of Asia cannot be won--not really won--by military means alone.

Savagery by Proxy. To attempt to win it so, as we are now doing in Korea, is not only to court final failure but also to force upon our men in the field acts and attitudes of the utmost savagery. This means not the usual, inevitable savagery of combat in the field, but savagery in detail--the blotting out of villages where the enemy may be hiding; the shooting and shelling of refugees who may include North Koreans in the anonymous white clothing of the Korean countryside, or who may be screening an enemy march upon our positions.

And there is savagery by proxy, the savagery of the South Korean police and (in some sectors) South Korean marines upon whom we rely for contact with the population and for ferreting out hidden enemies. I am not presuming to issue righteous indictments--or to ignore the even greater savagery of the North Korean army. I am simply stating the elementary facts of war in Korea. The South Korean police and the South Korean marines whom I observed in front line areas are brutal. They murder to save themselves the trouble of escorting prisoners to the rear; they murder civilians simply to get them out of the way or to avoid the trouble of searching and cross-examining them. And they extort information--information our forces need and require of the South Korean interrogators--by means so brutal that they cannot be described.*

Let it be understood that I do not refer to the South Korean army, which has fought with great bravery and effectiveness, but only to the South Korean police and marine units which I have seen in action behind our lines.

War & Politics. In some parts of Asia we would be hard put to it to find enough Americans who can speak the language and who know the ways of the country concerned. But this is not so in South Korea. We occupied it for nearly three years and in this time we should have accumulated a considerable staff of military and civilian officials who came to know the country, the people, the language.

It is true that many of the American civilian officials who were stationed in Korea before the war are there now. But I saw none of them at work in the field. We could have assembled and can still assemble a staff adequate to put our field forces in effective communication with the people of South Korea. Why haven't we done it? I know of only one reason. It is that our leaders still have not recognized the union of politics and arms in war.

We laugh at the "commissars" whom the Communists take good care to have with their military forces, and we refuse to see that with our enemies the "politics" comes first, the fighting second. We, in short, persist in thinking of political warfare as something to be practiced by rear-area pamphleteers and tolerated by the fellows doing the real fighting. However we may fare again in Europe with our chronic neglect of the political aspects of war, we cannot get by with it in Asia. That is the lesson of Korea.

In Korea today our military and political positions are intimately interwoven. For this is a guerrilla war, waged amongst and to some extent by the population of the country. For proof of this, come with me to South Korea and see with me some of the scenes that I have lately witnessed or heard of at firsthand.

The Soldiers Don't Forget. An important headquarters city in South Korea. On a luminous, sunny morning we are driving from the city southward toward our lines. Our jeep has to halt in the city street: in its path is a long, long file of refugees from the fighting areas. Watching them, I understand all that I have just been hearing about the danger of mass enemy infiltration even here, a good 40 miles from the nearest fighting. There are old men, and women, and young girls and children in the line. But there are also many young men. Most of them carry packs, apparently of extra clothing. They plod by, eyes down, backs bent, legs pumping up & down in the stiff and universal fashion of the burden bearers of Asia. At some point, in theory, they will be screened by Korean authorities and placed in temporary camps. But when? Where? Sitting in the jeep, watching them march by without escort, I knew the constricting doubt and fear that every American in Korea comes to know as he watches those silent strangers, to whom he cannot speak, filing down the roads, across the paddies and through the cities of the south.

Come now to a hilltop in southwest Korea. The hillside falls steeply to a river and a valley of paddies. Just across the valley is a schoolhouse, now the forward command post of an American infantry unit. Twice on this day, just before our arrival, this post had been attacked by hundreds of North Koreans who emerged without warning from the hills and very nearly overran our position. From the hilltop where we now stand, soldiers of an American machine gun squad had seen the repulsed enemy retire beyond the range and then, in plain sight of our men, calmly change from the green uniforms of the North Korean army to the white trousers and blouses of Korean peasants. The soldiers watching from the hill do not forget; every time they see a column of peasants coming toward them they reach for their guns, and sometimes they use their guns.

The Road to Nowhere. It is 6 o'clock on another morning at another place. Our command post is in a village at the foot of a valley, our men disposed across the rusty hills 2,000 and 3,000 yards beyond the post, and now, in the half-light of early morning, distant figures in white are walking down a road from the hills.

A few G.I.s, tired after a harassing night of intermittent alarms and firing, go taut, take up their rifles and walk stiff-legged toward the end of the village street nearest the oncoming people in white. One of the G.I.s says, "Christamighty, look there," and points across the paddies to our right. An old man with a stick in his hand leads the column on the road. Other men, not young, seem to be leading their families across the paddies.

They are evidently in their Sunday best --small white blouses, black cotton trousers on the boys and skirts on the little girls standing out like little dots from the all-white clothing of the men & women. Some of the boys have small packs on their backs, and already--they are three, four, five years old--their legs move in the piston motion of the Asian coolie. Now they stand, halted for a moment, looking with the bright interest of any children anywhere at the G.I.s who also stand, stiff, with rifles at the ready. Here there is none of the camaraderie of G.I. and child everywhere else that the U.S. Army has gone.

A G.I. mutters, "Where in hell are the goddam gooks?" meaning the South Korean policemen who should be here to handle the refugees. ("Gook" is the universal G.L word for any & all Koreans.) The thin file of soldiers and the still, dumb hundreds of refugees stand in the road facing each other. Then the moment is broken, the danger passes. A sergeant walks up to the old man with the stick, puts a hand on his shoulder and wheels him around, not roughly. The women break into a quick protesting chatter, and some of them move, as though blindly, down the road of their choice, toward us. The old man lifts his stick and waves imperatively, and slowly the column turns and the people take the road that, quite evidently, leads to nowhere for them.

All morning they come by the hundreds down the valley, some on the road and some across the paddies. Around 8 o'clock a detachment of South Korean policemen turns up, and an electric change comes over the people. Now, as the police approach and halt them and order them to stand, and then to move on, they leap at every command with a livid and unmistakable fear.

"If You Have to ..." It is midnight and all around the hills are astir. Here a sharp burst of small-arms fire, there the flashing life & death of an American shell, searching out the enemy who we know are gathering within 5,000 yards of this command post. One of the field telephones rings, an officer of the staff picks it up, listens a moment and says, "Oh, Christ, there's a column of refugees, three or four hundred of them, coming right down on B company." A major in the command tent says to the regimental commander, "Don't let them through."

And of course the major is right. Time & again, at position after position, this silent approach of whitened figures has covered enemy attack. Finally the colonel says, in a voice racked with wretchedness, "All right, don't let them through. But try to talk to them, try to tell them to go back."

"Yeah," says one of the little staff group, "but what if they don't go back?"

"Well, then," the colonel says, as though dragging himself toward some pit, "then fire over their heads."

"O.K.," an officer says, "we fire over their heads. Then what?"

The colonel seems to brace himself in the semidarkness of the blacked-out tent.

"Well, then, fire into them if you have to. If you have to, I said."

An officer speaks into the telephone, and the order goes across the wire into the dark hills.

We Must Talk to the People. Another afternoon, another place. The way lies through an area into which the U.S. Marines have just moved. It's good to see them, beautifully equipped and so obviously well trained. Once again I see refugees on this road. But there's a difference. Our own men, marines, surround them. As the jeep comes toward them I witness something of an advance in American communication with the people of the country. A marine is passing a mine detector over the clothing and packs of the refugees. Any metal--a rifle barrel, a pistol, a clip of ammunition, maybe the parts of a radio--will presumably be spotted by the detector. Anyhow, it is better than guns and the policemen whom I have seen at work.

A way down the road I enter the busy port of Pusan. Over its outskirts two helicopters are flying. Most of the Koreans on the highway look briefly up, then down again, as the helicopters hover and pass. But one, a boy of perhaps seven or eight, stares upward at the monstrous things with a gaze of fixed and bright fascination. His eyes shine, his lips are parted, and I think of an American boy gazing at his first bicycle on a Christmas morning.

The mine detector, the helicopters, the boy on the roadside--here, after a fashion, was communication between the American West and the people of South Korea. And, so thinking, I reflected as the jeep bumped into Pusan that the machine age and the machine man of the West can be pretty wonderful. But machines still can't talk to people, not as we must learn--and learn very soon--to talk to the people of Asia.

*A reporter for Britain's Manchester Guardian tells the story of an overcoat which was stolen from a U.S. vice consul in Pusan and which the local authorities were anxious to recover. A few days after the theft, Pusan's chief of police personally reported to the coat's owner. "All is well," said the chief, "as I am currently torturing two suspects."

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