(2 of 5)
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.