Max Hastings
Once upon a time, it was deemed a mark of virility to insist that a war must end with a victory. In 146 BC, Cato the Censor repeatedly told the Roman Senate “Carthaginem esse delendam” — Carthage, Rome’s great enemy, must be obliterated, as indeed it was.
In World War II, US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau called for the “pastoralization” of Germany following allied victory. In 2003, President George W. Bush proclaimed, “The security of the civilized world depends on victory in the war on terror, and that depends on victory in Iraq. So the United States of America will not leave until victory is achieved.”
Victory … victory … victory. Throughout history the word has had a seductive resonance for political and military leaders. Yet in the 21st century, such an outcome of conflict has become elusive. Some people who should know better, on both sides of the Atlantic, have used it in the context of Russia’s war on Ukraine. In their ideal world, they would urge “Kremlin esse delendam.”
Morally, they have a point. Yet realists have recognized since the invasion in February that unless we wish to risk the madness of general war with Russia — which almost certainly means nuclear war — the West must seek to contain the struggle.
It is, and should remain, a limited war, as have been all such clashes since 1945, notably including Korea and Vietnam. We have cause devoutly to hope that even a clash between China and the US over Taiwan might be contained within the region.
“The rules of limited war are messy,” political scientist Austin Carson wrote recently in Foreign Affairs. “In Ukraine and other conflicts, escalation is an intricate dance, informed by history, geography and universal distinctions between different kinds of wartime conduct. Both sides feel out what the other will tolerate … By going slow, the West can tease out the ambiguities without starting World War III.”
Today’s major powers have developed a better understanding of how to fight each other through proxies, without blowing up the world, since their first major experience of the phenomenon following the North Korean invasion of the South in June 1950. That was an act of unprovoked aggression only slightly less heinous than 2022’s Russian assault on Ukraine.
A close look at the Korean War’s progression offers valuable lessons on dealing with the new conflict in Eastern Europe.
In 1950, armies were commanded by officers who only five years earlier had led them to absolute victory over Germany and Japan. They had been taught in war colleges that battlefield victory went to whichever belligerent was most successful in generating violence. “Moderation in war is imbecility” is a catchphrase commonly attributed to Admiral Lord Fisher, during World War I.
Yet those Western generals were told by their governments that in Korea they must be extremely moderate, to deploy only a limited portion of violence, emphatically not including America’s nuclear weapons.
Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote afterward: “Plainly this attack did not amount to a casus belli against the Soviet Union,” North Korea’s supporter. He went on: “Equally plainly, it was an open, undisguised challenge to our internationally accepted position as the protector of South Korea … To back away from this challenge, in view of our capacity to for meeting it, would be highly destructive of the power and prestige of the United States.”
The then British ambassador in Washington, Sir Oliver Franks, recalled to me in 1985: “We were all asking ourselves where the communists might strike next.”
The US Seventh Fleet was deployed between Formosa — modern Taiwan — and the Chinese mainland, to quarantine the island against an assault by Mao Zedong’s legions. American troops were rushed to Korea from Japan, followed by a British infantry brigade from Hong Kong and later by Australian, Canadian and other foreign contingents, all under the command of General Douglas MacArthur. Congress rushed through a bill extending the US draft.
By a freak occurrence of history, the Soviet Union was then boycotting the United Nations Security Council. On June 27, the US was able to drive through a resolution committing the UN “to render such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to repel the armed attack and to restore international peace and security to the area.”
Thereafter, allied forces fought in Korea beneath the UN flag, though no one doubted that the US was principal guarantor of South Korea’s liberation.
These actions stunned Moscow and Beijing. The British ambassador to China messaged London: “The strength and extent of American reaction has been a shocking surprise, and will prove a grave embarrassment to the People’s Government.”
British envoy Sir David Kelly cabled from Moscow: “Attack was certainly launched with Soviet knowledge and almost certainly at Soviet instigation … Soviet government probably hoped for a walkover. UN Security Council acted with unexpected speed, and prompt US reaction had not been foreseen … I think we can conclude that North Korean attack was intended to exploit a favourable local situation, not to provoke a general conflict.” All these hunches proved accurate.
As the fighting on the peninsula thereafter seesawed, some of America’s allies — especially the British — became fearful that Korea was absorbing disproportionate forces, threatening the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s capacity to respond if the Soviets exploited the Asian diversion to attack in Europe.
The UK’s Labour government expressed private dismay when the US branded the invasion part of a global communist plot, centrally directed from Moscow: “There might have been advantage in seeking to isolate this incident and to deal with it as an act of aggression committed by the North Koreans on their own initiative. This would have enabled the Soviet government to withdraw without loss of prestige.”
By late 1950, the North Korean army was beaten, and allied forces were racing toward the North’s Yalu River border with China. The initial US objective, to liberate South Korea, was eclipsed by events; it seemed an opportunity to overthrow the communist regime of Kim Il Sung, which had gambled and lost.
The British government, still desperate to limit the struggle, was reluctant to allow its own contingent to cross the 38th parallel into the North, but MacArthur’s hubris proved irresistible. It was obvious that Moscow now regretted authorizing the invasion, and Washington also discounted any intervention from Beijing.
On Oct. 19, the North’s capital of Pyongyang fell. MacArthur contemptuously dismissed a British proposal to stop short of a buffer zone south of the Yalu. He characterized this as appeasement, comparable to the agreement with Hitler at Munich in 1938.
On Nov. 1, some British troops in North Korea glimpsed on the horizon four horsemen, who gazed down upon them before disappearing. When it became plain that these were Chinese soldiers, the first scouts of what soon became a host of supposed “volunteers” sweeping into North Korea, the British dubbed them the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
First by night, and then around the clock, Chinese troops assaulted Americans preparing for Thanksgiving, who were successively surprised, stunned, traumatized, then thrown into panic-stricken retreat.
MacArthur, who viewed the Chinese intrusion as a personal insult, raged at a decision from Washington that no allied aircraft should bomb north of the Yalu. Americans both in and out of uniform called for atomic weapons. Colonel Ellis Williamson, later a general in Vietnam, told me in 1985: “I favored using one bomb in an unoccupied area. Pop it off. Say to the communists, ‘Come off of this stuff and get out.’”
A secret report from the battlefield to Britain’s War Office described bitter frustration among US troops, rage that they were being subjected to defeat when they possessed means to vaporize the communists: “They take the view that the United States should stop consulting anybody and should use the atomic bomb. Their emotional reaction is that the Russian is solely responsible and that therefore the logical thing is to atom bomb Moscow.”
Britain’s chiefs of staff expressed concern that if conventional forces proved unable to turn the tide, Americans’ demands to use an atomic weapon on North Korea would become irresistible: “There was general agreement from the military point of view that [such action] would be unsound … the effects would be worldwide and might be very damaging. Moreover, it would probably provoke general war.”
Britain’s foremost politicians and soldiers, led by Prime Minister Clement Attlee, traveled to Washington in December 1950 to make a passionate case that the Korean conflict should remain limited. There should be no bombing of China, less still action against Russia.
Field Marshal Sir William Slim, his country’s ablest general of World War II, told the Americans that if the Soviet air force intervened in Korea, “we should have to say goodbye.”
The Americans, in turn, were exasperated by perceived British pusillanimity in the face of communist aggression. They were especially angered that the UK strove to sustain business as usual in Asia, involving large trade with China, even as Beijing’s forces were striving to kill Westerners in Korea.
General Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, demanded acidly whether a Chinese attack on Hong Kong, then under British Rule, “would suddenly mean that we were at war with China, though the British refused to agree that we were at war when its ‘volunteers’ were killing British and American soldiers in Korea.”
Franks, the UK ambassador, told me of the acute apprehension in Attlee’s delegation about what the Americans might do “if their backs were to the wall in Korea.” “There was a fear that War, with a capital W, might break out in the Far East,” he recalled. “The last thing we wanted was the US getting bogged down in China, because we saw no end to it.”
The British delegation went home from Washington unhappy that it seemed, in Franks’ words, “not to have convinced the Americans of the need to make a serious effort to reach a political settlement with the Chinese, and not to have shaken them in their determination to undertake some kind of limited war against China.”
The four largest US veterans’ organizations petitioned President Harry Truman to “use such means as may be necessary” to check the communists. On Dec. 24, MacArthur submitted a list of proposed “retaliation targets” in China and North Korea requiring 26 atomic bombs.
Republicans, then as now in the context of Ukraine, alternated between demanding escalation and total withdrawal. Some senior members of Congress pointed out how effectively nuclear weapons had been used against the Japanese in 1945. Meanwhile a poll showed 66% of Americans favoring abandonment of Korea.
On Jan. 12, 1951, the Joint Chiefs demanded the White House stop equivocating and declare “a full state of war with China.” As a historian of the conflict, I believe that had Chinese forces succeeded in driving the UN force entirely out of Korea in December 1950, the pressure on Truman to use nuclear weapons might have proved irresistible.
Fortunately for the world, in the months that followed, America calmed down. General Matthew Ridgway, as field commander, stabilized the front in Korea. Never again did the Chinese — who thereafter did most of the fighting — prove able to secure a decisive breakthrough. South Korea was devastated, but liberated.
Interestingly, Beijing that winter mirrored Washington’s earlier mistake by convincing itself that it might achieve an absolute victory in Korea. Amid Western despair, China could almost certainly have secured a deal that included securing Formosa’s UN Security Council seat. By overreaching, however, it wound up with much less.
After MacArthur was relieved of duty by Truman that April — Bradley declared that MacArthur “was not in sympathy with the decision to try to limit the conflict to Korea” — both sides observed unwritten restraints on their conduct. Most Americans abandoned notions of using nuclear weapons. When Russian pilots began flying fighters over North Korea, Washington knew but said nothing. UN forces stayed out of China.
Franks described to me his conviction that the wisdom displayed in limiting the war reflected “an extraordinary and fortunate accident that at this moment of history, such a group of Americans occupied the principal positions of power.”
Truman, he said, was “a man of wider outlook than you might think”; Acheson was “a natural first-class in any university”; Defense Secretary George Marshall was “a cool, definite mind which looked for solutions to problems rather than simply worrying about them”; Bradley was “very, very high class.” Below them were some of America’s great public servants: Robert Lovett, George Kennan, Chip Bohlen, Dean Rusk.
The doctrine of limited war would find more favor with policy makers than with those responsible for implementing it on the battlefield. When the armistice that ended the fighting was signed at Panmunjom in July 1953, the US commander in Korea, General Mark Clark, wrote sourly that this outcome capped his career, “but it was a cap without a feather.”
For years afterward, America’s foremost soldiers sulked like Clark about having been denied victory in Korea. Several later acknowledged ruefully, however, that had it proved possible to achieve in Vietnam what had been done in Korea, they would have embraced it as a triumph. They had since 1953 acknowledged realities about conflict in the nuclear age, in which it was essential to contain costs and casualties, and above all to avoid general war.
Those lessons, painfully learned in Korea, apply in Ukraine. There is obviously a critical difference: No NATO forces are engaged head-on against the Russians, and it suits both sides to keep matters that way. Moscow, in turn, has thus far held back from attacking supply lines from Poland into Ukraine.
Western governments agonize about how far to go in sending advanced weapons systems to Kyiv — they flinch from offering jet fighters. They provide extensive intelligence and training to Ukrainian personnel, but are unwilling to deploy naval escorts for grain shipments through the Black Sea. The London insurance market is still — to the anger of some allies — covering Russian oil shipments.
Both sides are constantly exploring how far they can go in pursuing their strategic objectives without precipitating a horrific showdown in arms between Russia and the West. The unfortunate Ukrainians, of course, feel no sense that the savagery to which they are being subjected is constrained by either strategic or humanitarian considerations on Russia’s part. But the rest of the world still prefers regionally limited war to the other kind, which could doom us all.
In 2003, when General David Petraeus was commander of the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, he famously mused to the reporter Rick Atkinson: “Tell me how this ends.”
While we should never flinch from striving to avert defeat for our causes, almost always in modern times we are likely to struggle to secure an old-fashioned victory.
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