Промышленный лизинг Промышленный лизинг  Методички 

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and in Greece, was new to almost all observers and participants in Korea. It was called napalm. Here is one description of its effect from the New York Times.

A napalm raid hit the village three or four days ago when the Chinese were holding up the advance, and nowhere in [he village have they buried the dead because there is nobody left to do so. ... The inhabitants throughout the village and in the fields were caught and killed and kept the exact postures they had held when the napalm struck-a man about to get on his bicycle, fifty boys and girls playing in an orphanage, a housewife strangely unmarked, holding in her hand a page torn from a Sears-Roebuck catalogue crayoned at Mail Order No. 3,811,294 for a $2.98 bewitching bed jacket-coral . There must be almost two hundred dead in the tiny hamlet.39

The United States may also have waged germ warfare against North Korea and China, as was discussed earlier in the chapter on China.

At the same time, the CIA reportedly was targeting a single individual for termination-North Korean leader Kim II Sung. Washington sent a Cherokee Indian, code-named Buffalo, to Hans V. Tofte, a CIA officer stationed in Japan, after Buffalo had agreed to serve as Kim II Sungs assassin. Buffalo was to receive a considerable amount of money if his mission succeeded. It obviously did not, and nothing further has been revealed about the incident.40

Another widely-held belief in the United States during the war was that American prisoners in North Korean camps were dying off like flies because of Communist neglect and cruelty. The flames of this very emotional issue were fanned by the tendency of US officials to exaggerate the numbers involved. During November 1951, for example-long before the end of the war-American military announcements put the count of POW deaths at between 5,000 and 8,000.41 However, an extensive study completed by the US Army two years after the war revealed that the POW death toll for the entire war was 2,730 (out of 7,190 held in camps; an unknown number of other prisoners never made it to the camps, being shot in the field because of the inconvenience of dealing with them in the midst of combat, a practice engaged in by both sides).

The study concluded that there was evidence that the high death rate was not due primarily to Communist maltreatment... it could be accounted for largely by the ignorance or the callousness of the prisoners themselves. 42 Callousness refers here to the soldiers lack of morale and collective spirit. Although not mentioned in the study, the North Koreans, on several occasions, claimed that many American POWs also died in the camps as a result of the heavy US bombing.

The study of course could never begin to catch up with all the scare headlines to which the Western world had been treated for three years. Obscured as well was the fact that several times as many Communist prisoners had died in US/South Korean camps- halfway through the war the official figure stood at 6,60043-though these camps did hold many more prisoners than those in the North.

The American public was also convinced, and probably still is, that the North Koreans and Chinese had brainwashed US soldiers. This story arose to explain the fact that as many as 30 percent of American POWs had collaborated with the enemy in one way or another, and one man in every seven, or more than thirteen per cent, was guilty of serious collaboration-writing disloyal tracts ... or agreeing to spy or organize for the Communists after the war. 44 Another reason the brainwashing theme was promoted by Washington was to increase the likelihood that statements made by returning prisoners which questioned the official version of the war would be discounted.



In the words of Yale psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton, brainwashing was popularly held to be an all-powerful, irresistible, unfathomable, and magical method of achieving total control over the human mind. 45 Although the CIA experimented, beginning in the 1950s, to develop just such a magic, neither they nor the North Koreans or Chinese ever possessed it. The Agency began its behavior-control or mind-control experiments on human subjects (probably suspected double agents), using drugs and hypnosis, in Japan in July 1950, shortly after the beginning of the Korean War. In October, they apparently used North Korean prisoners of war as subjects.46 In 1975, a US Navy psychologist, Lt. Com. Thomas Narut, revealed that his naval work included establishing how to induce servicemen who may not be naturally inclined to kill, to do so under certain conditions. He referred to these men using the words hitmen and assassin . Narut added that convicted murderers as well had been released from military prisons to become assassins.47

Brainwashing, said the Army study, has become a catch phrase, used for so many things that it no longer has any precise meaning and a precise meaning is necessary in this case.48

The prisoners, as far as Army psychiatrists have been able to discover, were not subjected to anything that could properly be called brainwashing. Indeed, the Communist treatment of prisoners, while it came nowhere near fulfilling the requirements of the Genera Convention, rarely involved outright cruelty, being instead a highly novel blend of leniency and pressure ... The Communists rarely used physical torture ... and the Army has not found a single verifiable case in which they used it for the specific purpose of forcing a man to collaborate or to accept their convictions.

According to the study, however, some American airmen, of the 90 or so who were captured, were subjected to physical abuse in an attempt to extract confessions about germ warfare. This could reflect either a greater Communist resentment about the use of such a weapon, or a need to produce some kind of corroboration of a false or questionable claim.

American servicemen were also subjected to political indoctrination by their jailers. Here is how the US Army saw it:

In the indoctrination lectures, the Communists frequently displayed global charts dotted with our military bases, the names of which were of course known to many of the captives. See those bases? the instructor would say, tapping them on the chart with his pointer. They are American-full of war materiel. You know they are American. And you can see they are ringing Russia and China. Russia and China do not have one base outside their own territory. From this its clear which side is the warmonger. Would America have these bases and spend millions to maintain them were it not preparing to war on Russia and China? This argument seemed plausible to many of the prisoners. In general they had no idea that these bases showed not the United States wish for war, but its wish for peace, that they had been established as part of a series of treaties aimed not at conquest, but at curbing Red aggression.50

The Chinese Communists, of course, did not invent this practice. During the American Civil War, prisoners of both the South and the North received indoctrination about the respective merits of the two sides. And in the Second World War, democratization courses were held in US and British POW camps for Germans, and reformed Germans were granted privileges. Moreover, the US Army was proud to state that Communist prisoners in American camps during the Korean War were taught what democracy stands for .51



The predicted Chinese aggression manifested itself about four months after the war in Korea began. The Chinese entered the war after American planes had violated their air space on a number of occasions, had bombed and strafed Chinese territory several times (always in error ], when hydro-electric plants on the Korean side of the border, vital to Chinese industry, stood in great danger, and US or South Korean forces had reached the Chinese border, the Yalu River, or come within a few miles of it in several places.

The question must be asked: How long would the United States refrain from entering a war being waged in Mexico by a Communist power from across the sea, which strafed and bombed Texas border towns, was mobilized along the Rio Grande, and was led by a general who threatened war against the United States itself?

American airpower in Korea was fearsome to behold. As would be the case in Vietnam, its use was celebrated in the wholesale dropping of napalm, the destruction of villages suspected of aiding the enemy , bombing cities so as to leave no useful facilities standing, demolishing dams and dikes to cripple the irrigation system, wiping out rice crops ... and in those moving expressions like scorched-earth policy , saturation bombing , and operation killer .52

You can kiss that group of villages good-bye, exclaimed Captain Everett L. Hundley of Kansas City, Kansas after a bombing raid.53

I would say that the entire, almost the entire Korean Peninsula is just a terrible mess, testified Major General Emmett ODonnell before the Senate when the war was one year old. Everything is destroyed. There is nothing standing worthy of the name. 54

And here, the words of the venerable British military guide, Brasseys Annual, in its 1951 yearbook:

It is no exaggeration to state that South Korea no longer exists as a country. Its towns have been destroyed, much of its means of livelihood eradicated, and its people reduced to a sullen mass dependent upon charity and exposed to subversive influences. When the war ends no gratitude can be expected from the South Koreans, but it is to be hoped that the lesson will have been learned that it is worse than useless to destroy to liberate. Certainly, western Europe would never accept such a liberation .55

The worst of the bombing was yet to come. That began in the summer of 1952 and was Washingtons way of putting itself in a better bargaining position in the truce discussions with the Communists, which had been going on for a full year while the battles raged. The extended and bitter negotiations gave rise to another pervasive Western belief-that it was predominantly Communist intransigence, duplicity, and lack of peaceful intentions which frustrated the talks and prolonged the war.

This is a lengthy and entangled chapter of the Korean War story, but one does not have to probe too deeply to discover the unremarkable fact that the barriers were erected by the anti-Communist side as well. Syngman Rhee, for example, was so opposed to any outcome short of total victory that both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations drew up plans for overthrowing him;56 which is not to suggest that the American negotiators were negotiating in the best of faith. The last thing they wanted to be accused of was having allowed the commies to make suckers of them. Thus it was that in November of 1951 we could read in the New York Times:

The unadorned way that an apparently increasing number of them [American soldiers in Korea] see the situation right now is that the Communists have made important concessions, while the United Nations Command, as they view it, continues to make more and more demands. ... The United Nations truce team has



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