UN forces crossed the 38th parallel on October 1, but in the meantime a Chinese “volunteer” army secretly entered North Korea and, on October 25, opened a successful counter-strike. On November 24, when the UN hit back, it was ambushed by 300,000 Chinese troops who operated on the theory that decisiveness in the first battle would rout the enemy.37
Stalin was delighted by the progress of the battle. During the first week in December, he wrote to Premier Zhou Enlai that the Chinese “successes gladden not only me and my comrades in the leadership, but also all Soviet people. Allow me to greet from the soul you and your friends in the leadership, the People’s Liberation Army of China and the entire Chinese people in connection with these enormous successes in their struggle against the American troops.”38 He encouraged them to fight on: “We think that the time has not arrived for China to show all its cards, while Seoul is still not liberated.”
Word of this new Communist success on the battlefield hit Washington hard because it was so unexpected. The public mood was not helped by Truman’s incautious remarks at a news conference that the option of using an atomic bomb was on the table. Finally on December 15, at the urging of George Marshall, now secretary of defense, the president declared a state of national emergency, something that had not happened in the United States during two world wars. The country appeared to be heading for World War III, especially with MacArthur ready to use Nationalist Chinese forces and to drop forty atomic bombs on China. The general made other statements that were at variance with government policy, and for a while, he got away with such challenges to presidential power. Their effect was to make Truman look weak, and that, to say the least, did not bode well for U.S. relations with China.
It might have been possible to open negotiations at the end of 1950. However, with the Chinese forces winning or even just holding their own, Mao was looking strong. On December 31, with Stalin’s complete support, he ordered another offensive, in spite of warnings from his military that more troops were needed. The attack began on January 3, overran Seoul within a week, and gave the Communists another victory to celebrate. Mao was greedy for more and brushed aside a remarkably generous cease-fire offer put forward by UN representatives on January 11, according to which all foreign troops would be withdrawn from Korea. A four-power meeting of the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and China would then negotiate the Korean crisis, and beyond that all outstanding Far East issues, including Taiwan. Mao turned it down and stoked Chinese nationalism, hoping to use an even greater victory to win over more people for Communism.39
The Communist leaders were pleased with the initial success of their renewed offensive. Toward the end of January 1951, however, UN forces stopped the assault from the North and began pushing it back. It was too little to save Truman’s presidency, and on March 29, discouraged by the war and nagged by the show of popular support for MacArthur, he announced he would not run for reelection. On April 11 he finally fired MacArthur, an action that provoked howls of protest from the American public. When the general returned home, he was treated like a hero and played it for all it was worth. He gave a farewell address to a joint meeting of Congress and received a bigger ticker-tape parade in New York than the one given Dwight Eisenhower in 1945. The tide had really turned against Truman and the Democrats, but U.S. politics did not matter much in Korea, where war continued to rage. Eisenhower and the Republicans would sweep the elections in 1952.
During the war, Stalin was in frequent telegraphic contact with Mao, sometimes several times a day, and he was asked to consider military matters right down to the tactical level. Then he had to answer numerous political questions from Beijing, for example, about the demands that should be made in negotiations for a cease-fire and on delicate POW issues. Additionally, the Chinese sent him endless requests for arms. When the war degenerated into a stalemate once again in May 1951, Mao wanted to continue anyway.
The brutality of Stalin’s logic comes across in a June 5 letter of support for Mao’s decision. “The war in Korea should not be speeded up,” he said, “since a drawn out war, in the first place, gives the possibility to the Chinese troops to study contemporary warfare on the field of battle and in the second place shakes up the Truman regime in America and harms the military prestige of the Anglo-American troops.” The Kremlin Boss recommended another short, hard blow at the enemy to give a boost to the sagging morale of the Chinese and Korean troops.40
In August and September 1952, Mao sent Zhou Enlai to Moscow for still more in-depth discussions. He was there to pursue their goal of making China independent in defense and transforming it into a military superpower. Stalin preferred to send finished parts that would be assembled in China. That relationship would keep the Chinese in a position of dependence, and in any case they wanted more than the Soviet Union could deliver. Zhou said that China’s five-year plan would devote more than one-third of the budget to the military. Stalin was taken aback by what he considered to be this “very unbalanced” ratio of civil and military spending. It was, he thought, more tilted to supplying the military than the Soviet Union’s budget had been during the Second World War.41
While in Moscow, Zhou said that since May 1951 the military situation on the ground had been stable. The conflict had changed from a war of movement to one of position, with each side heavily dug in. The Chinese thought that the struggle should continue. If Stalin agreed, what exactly would he recommend? “Mao Zedong is right,” was his answer, “this war is getting on America’s nerves.” He added, in one of his deliberately icy statements, that “the North Koreans have lost nothing, except for casualties that they suffered during the war.” The struggle had revealed “America’s weakness,” and even with the help of more than twenty countries in the UN, it was bound to fail. The Soviet Union would provide the Koreans with the supplies to carry on. Zhou noted that China was playing “the vanguard role in this war” and that if it succeeded, “then the USA will not be able to unleash a third world war at all.”
That remark led Stalin into a long reflection that shows his thinking at the time. The Americans were not to be feared and were not capable “of waging a large-scale war at all, especially after the Korean War.” The Germans, he said, “conquered France in 20 days. It’s been already two years, and the USA has still not subdued little Korea. What kind of strength is that? America’s primary weapons are stockings, cigarettes, and other merchandise,” Stalin joked. “They want to subjugate the world, yet they cannot subdue little Korea. No, Americans don’t know how to fight.” Instead they were “pinning their hopes on the atom bomb and air power. But one cannot win a war with that. One needs infantry, and they don’t have much infantry; the infantry they do have is weak. They are fighting with little Korea, and already people are weeping in the USA. What will happen if they start a large-scale war? Then, perhaps, everyone will weep.”42
Nevertheless, Stalin counseled the Chinese that if they bombed South Korea from the air, they should not use planes with their own markings. That is, they should keep up the illusion that only volunteers from China were fighting in Korea and that China itself was not involved in the war. Zhou said that negotiations in Panmunjom would continue to seek an armistice on favorable terms, while at the same time the Chinese government was preparing for the conflict to continue for two years or longer.