The "Cold War" and Seven Small Wars
The period after 1945 has turned out to be considerably more turbulent
than most Americans expected. Though the victory over Fascism and
Japanese militarism has proved to be psychologically and historically
complete, the struggles between the victors have developed such mistrust
and bitterness as to create a present-day equivalent of the Thirty
Years' War, rather than a period of peace as it was understood by
educated men of the nineteenth century.
Along with many other military and political phenomena, psychological
warfare has been thrust into a period of "no war and no peace" which has
proved to be extraordinarily difficult for Western men to deal with
either emotionally or intellectually.[45] Such phrases as Churchill's
term, "the Iron Curtain," and Walter Lippmann's coinage, "the Cold War,"
have become a part of civilized speech throughout the world. They have
obscured almost as much as they have explained. It is entirely
conceivable that an adequate description of the present historical
period will only be written after the forces now operating have ceased
to be significant; at that future time it may be possible for serious
and reflective men to determine what happened in the middle of the
twentieth century.
=Recognition and Delay.= One of the preeminent factors in the
psychological and opinion aspect of the turmoil in the mid-twentieth
century has been the very sharp contrast between the _time_ on which a
given event occurred, the _delay_ between the occurrence of the event
and the final understanding of that event in their own terms by the
strategic policy-makers affected, and the successful _recognition_ of
the event in policy papers looking toward a further future. The
political and strategic character of much recent military history has
therefore been a grotesque comedy of errors--ridiculous if it were not
so deadly serious--involving the lives of the major urban populations
of the world.
An event such as the liberation of Indochina from Japanese military
occupation in 1945, met competently and reasonably by the standards of
an anticipated "world of 1946," which unfortunately never materialized,
led to the frustrations, bloodshed, deceit, and warfare of the late
1940s, and by 1954 became partially intelligible as a facet of the free
world's struggle against Communism.
=New Interpretations of Policy and Propaganda.= Polemic writing has been
done concerning the role of propaganda, psychological warfare,
psychological strategy, and comparable operations. In many instances the
polemics have involved the presentation of two sides, each of which was
right--one side maintaining that the old-fashioned world of free,
sovereign nations, meeting in a parliament of man as constituted in the
United Nations, could and should use the "realities" of traditional
power politics as a guide to the present and the future, and should
avoid the hopelessness, terrorism, and fanaticism of chronic ideological
war; the other side with equal merits has often argued that the
ideological war is here, that its deniers are the witting or unwitting
sympathizers or appeasers of Communism, that their "realities" are
outmoded, and that the United States must face up to a crusade which
will end in annihilation or death for either the Communist system or the
constitutional democratic group of states.
What such polemics overlook is the terrifying probability that events
may happen so rapidly that no one on either the Communist or
anti-Communist side is capable of assimilating a new datum, such as the
development of the hydrogen bomb, the death of Stalin, or the appearance
of Israel among the nations, _until well after the event has occurred_.
The occurrence of public events in all past civilizations has involved a
considerable number of public agreements on the major hypotheses
concerned; as pointed out earlier in this book, the antagonists in older
wars usually, though not always, knew what the war was about. Today the
spiritual, psychological, logical, and scientific inconsistencies and
paradoxes within each system are so deep as to make the definition of
long-range goals almost impossible. Any one goal, such as the
establishment of peace, the appreciation of an international system of
alliances against aggression, the maintenance of national sovereignty,
the protection of a free-enterprise economy, the assurance of
self-determination to non-self-governing peoples, or the like, may, _if
emphasized_, contradict the concomitant goals which support it.
=Communist and Anti-Communist Psychological Events.= Each of the two
major systems has strengths of its own. The Communist strengths are
sometimes too apparent to Americans, so much so that Americans
exaggerate Communist power and overlook serious deficiencies in the
economies and the political character of the Communist group of nations.
The Communists can suppress dissidence with a fanatical party line: the
price they pay is the abrupt shifting of that line as international
situations change. The Communists can appeal to youth by their dogmatic
faith that they are the masters of the probable future of the world:
they risk much if this faith does not pay off and if the world's youth
sometimes turns against them because they promise too much and deliver
too little. The Communists operating from an allegedly material basis
offer psychological and spiritual values of a perverted kind, but have
very considerable propaganda value; they give people a chance to
sacrifice themselves, to work for causes greater than their individual
personalities, "something to die for," and an apparent understanding of
history: yet the Communists also risk psychological exhaustion and
cynicism among their élite cadres as well as among their mass
followings.
In the next chapter, concerning strategic information operations of the
United States Government in the foreign field, there will be further
discussion of the psychological strengths of the free world; we will say
at this point that in the light of the strategic and military contexts
of the postwar period the free world has had the advantages of modesty,
relaxation, and elasticity. Among Americans, even among intelligent
Americans, it is frequent to find the assumption being made that the
chief strength of the free world consists of its legal rights and its
democratic political processes, rather than in its actual (not merely
formal) toleration of many points of view and its actual relaxation of
the populations under its control.
Since the free world is not committed to victory as much as is the
Communist world, it can afford more defeats without a corresponding loss
of morale. Since the free world has not promised a Utopian future, it
can go from the reality of the 1950s to whatever realities the 1960s or
the 1970s may bring without a sharp letdown in morale or widespread
heartbreak among its most gifted advocates. In Cold War terms the free
world is committed to fighting, but not to victory, while the Communists
are committed to the actual though remote promise of triumph for their
system throughout the world. The citizens of the United States can
therefore contemplate the survival of the USSR or its annihilation and
replacement by a democratic Russia with equanimity; their Soviet
opposite numbers, group for group and class for class, cannot be as
detached from the struggle.
Over all of us there hangs the entirely uncertain future raised by
possible use of atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs, and other novel weapons--a
future about which former Governor Adlai Stevenson felt so gloomy that
he said another war would end civilization. (The rejoinder can, of
course, be made that if another war would end civilization anyhow, win,
lose, or draw, the United States might as well disband its defense
forces now and enjoy life for the few short years that remain.)
=The Cold War.= In some respects the Cold War is not novel. It resembles
the intercivilizational wars of the past in which competing
civilizations with definite moral and political foundations fought one
another for final survival. This kind of warfare is very different
indeed from struggles waged between nations which have a common
civilization and which have a common interest in the preservation of
that civilization. The Americans of the 1950s are waging a struggle much
more like that between the Protestants and Catholics in the years
1618-48 than they are to the Civil War of 1861-65 or the Revolutionary
War of 1775-81. In some respects we Americans are back all the way to
the fight between the Aztecs and Cortez or the struggle between Chinese
and Chams in ancient Annam. What Mr. Lippmann calls merely a Cold War is
something deeper, bigger, and worse than any war Americans have ever
known before. The only parallel to it was the struggle between settlers
and Indians on our own frontier: our battles with the Indians at least
had the advantage of never leaving us with the hideous dread that the
American Indians might sweep a White and Christian civilization from
this continent.
=Nature of the Cold War.= The Cold War is therefore a struggle, the
beginnings of which can be found at any one of several dates (1848, 1917
and 1943 are some of those given) which is now being waged between
non-Communist states and a Communist group of nations. No one now living
can speak with assurance of the outcome. Only the most foolhardy of
optimists could visualize a world in which the better aspects of each
system would be developed and the factors common to each would be
underscored and strengthened as supports for a peace-seeking
international system under the UN. The struggle is larger than a war
because it comprises pre-belligerent, belligerent, and post-belligerent
activities both in global wars and in a possible general war. On the
Communist side the techniques include sabotage, revolution, conspiracy,
and fanatical organization. On the anti-Communist side a family of
para-military weapons is gradually being developed and may or may not be
thrown into the struggle. No war was ever as bitter or uncertain as this
one because war, whatever its demerits, at least commits the nations to
combat and to victory. War has the supreme merit of _decision_. The Cold
War does not: people have to fight it without knowing what it is or what
they would get out of it if they could obtain the advantage.[46]
=Origins of the Cold War.= In retrospect it is easy to argue that the
Communist system has been fighting all non-Communist systems ever since
1848; that the Soviet system has been in a moral condition of war with
all other governments since 1917; that the democratic-Soviet alliance
against the Fascist powers during 1941-45 was a sham and a fraud
covering a three-cornered war; and that therefore attempts at a good
alliance between non-Communists and Communists were shams, mistakes, or
frauds. This is easy to say in the 1950s; it was not so apparent in the
1940s.
It can even be argued that Yalta, and everything for which Yalta stands,
was a tragic mistake and yet a blessed one. If the Western powers had
not attempted to deal amicably with the Soviet Union at Yalta the
Western peoples, already hypersensitized in matters of conscience, might
have attributed to themselves and to their posterity an unbearable
burden of guilt. We and our children might have gone down fighting while
wondering in our innermost hearts, "Why didn't we make a _real_ try to
avoid war with Soviet Russia?"
Though the Teheran and Yalta agreements have been violated by the USSR
almost from the moment they were concluded, it can be argued that the
Western world was wise in experimenting with appeasement because it
liberated our consciences for future struggle. No one can possibly argue
that we did not try to get along with the Communist system, that we
failed to offer the Communists a reasonable share in the world of power
politics, or that we threatened the Communists with aggression during
the course of our anti-fascist struggle. For better or for worse, we
_did_ try to get along with them. We have failed.
Why have we failed?
The failure seems to be much more on the side of the Communists than on
the side of the free nations. Though it is possible for Left-liberals or
hypercritical intellectuals to find fault with the U.S. and British
position in this respect or that, short of extreme nit-picking it must
be argued that the Communists jumped the gun on the Western powers in
almost every case. Tito, while still in agreement with Moscow, proved
implacable toward the constitutional Yugoslav government and the Church
as they had existed before 1941. While Roosevelt was still living the
Lublin Poles prepared a savage double-cross of the London Poles. Whether
Communist action arose from a lamentable fear of our own aggressiveness,
or a Machiavellian plan to conquer the world does not, at any time,
matter very much; what matters is the almost indisputable fact that in
many parts of the world the Communists undertook the initiative against
the anti-Communists.
(The first edition of this book, PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE, was written in
1946 and published in 1948; the second edition is being completed eight
years later, in 1954. Any reader who contrasts the two editions will see
at a glance that the author, although suspicious of Communism, had no
real anticipation of the fury or seriousness of the Communist attack
upon the non-Communist world, nor of the strategic arguments and
responsibilities which the free world would therewith be forced to
accept.)
=The Cold War and the Actual Fighting.= As late as 1948, when the
talented and bold-minded Lt. Gen. Albert C. Wedemeyer was Deputy Chief
of Staff, the U.S. Army's psychological warfare facilities at the
General Staff level consisted of a few paper assignments to colonels in
operations and in training together with your author as a part-time
consultant and one girl stenographer to keep the files. By 1953 these
numbers were multiplied by the hundreds. Each of the military services
has accepted its responsibility so that by 1953 there was not merely one
Army PsyWar system, but there were at least five separate organizations
in the U.S. Government in different places and at five levels directly
concerned with these problems.
[Illustration: _Figure 71: Official Chinese Letter._ This surrender pass
from Korea shows intelligent American use of materials from another
culture--The ancient format, in this case, of the traditional Chinese
bureaucratic letter.]
A curious division of responsibilities not anticipated by the Creel
Committee of World War I or the OWI of World War II arose in the
Washington of the Cold War period. While the military establishments
were given jurisdiction over propaganda activities connected with actual
combat, other propaganda activities were kept largely in civilian hands,
though simultaneously the direction of civilian policy at its very
highest level became para-military through the influence of the National
Security Council.
In other words, most of the national foreign-policy decisions at the
highest level have been dictated in recent years by strategic
considerations. They have been National Security Council decisions, not
Cabinet-type decisions of the kind which might have been made in the
years of William McKinley or Warren G. Harding. Yet, even though the
decisions have been strategic in type, the propaganda implementation of
these decisions has fallen for the greater part on the State Department
and on the economic aid program facilities, not on the military. The
military have been pretty strictly confined to those aspects of
propaganda which directly pertain to combat areas. By 1953 U.S. leaders
had begun to understand the situation with which they had been dealing
since 1947 and in light of that necessarily belated but correct
appreciation of their own position, the William Jackson Committee began
to recommend that propaganda policy be written not as something
self-contained, but be considered an integral part of every other U.S.
Government decision possessing world situation or news impact.
=The Cold War and the Home Front.= Among editors, professors, officers,
officials, and other experts concerned with foreign affairs, there has
been frequent lamentation that the American people did not take the
great struggle of our time more seriously. The contrary should be
argued, at least by way of contrast.
If it is true that the United States is engaged in a major struggle, if
it is further true that this struggle has no visible end, if this
struggle threatens all of us and our children as well with lifetimes of
tension and violent deaths under ultra-destructive weapons, one may
quite reasonably ask the question, _Which is the better reaction for the
bulk of the American population: normality, emotional health, mild
irresponsibility, and the stockpiling of nervous and physical strength
for a time of trial which may lie far ahead; or, alternatively, tension
now, worry now, responsibility now, fatigue now, all the way through
from the uncertain present across the bitter and perilous future to the
months of near-Armageddon which may lie fifteen, twenty, or thirty years
ahead?_
Sadly and seriously, with no attempt at cleverness or mockery, a staff
officer could argue today that the American people should leave their
worries to their leaders so as to be strong when the time of trouble
comes. In the field of civil defense, for instance, it is grotesque to
spend billions on offense and little on the saving of American lives. On
second glance, this may not be so grotesque after all. The technological
advance of fissionable and thermonuclear weapons is so rapid, the
development of guided missiles and other carrying instruments so swift
and so unpredictable, that a 1955 model civil-defense system might
become a fool's paradise by 1960. If this be true, it is better to live
as well as we can to maintain the profession of arms at an adequate
level, to hope (quite irrationally) for the best, and to let the dead of
the future bury their dead as best they may.[47]
=Alternatives to Victory and Defeat.= In a cold war, as opposed to a
war, the role of the armed services is to deter the enemy, not fight
the enemy, and the purpose of the government is to achieve an
accommodation (in the sense of an arrangement satisfactory to both
sides), not a victory. If this is correct, serious reappraisal must be
made of the U.S. PsyWar position as well as of our strategic thinking.
The alternatives to victory and defeat are forms of survival of the
competitors. The entire health of each competing civilization matters.
It is obvious enough to Americans that we must remain prosperous, free,
constitutional, democratic. It goes without saying that we must, as far
as our individual fortunes permit us, retain our belief in God and
derive from religious beliefs those spiritual strengths not available to
the Communists. What is not often raised is the equally important factor
of _the conquest of probability_.
Wars are much more often won by people who are sure they are going to
win than by people who know that they would _like_ to win, but who think
at the same time that they _will_ probably be defeated. The
over-confidence of a Cortez or a Mao Tse-tung may seem insane to many of
us. With the passion for security so prevalent in individual and
national lives, both the Western powers and the individuals comprising
them grotesquely exaggerate the margin of safety which they need in
which to survive.
Part of this springs from the fact that much of our civilization is not
forward-looking, that neither young Americans nor old Americans have a
clear-cut or hopeful picture of what the world should be, will be, and
must be, by A.D. 2055. On the Communist side it is frequent, but not
universal, to discover that the best Communist cadres are made up of men
who are dead sure that Communism will win, who are equally sure that
Communism does not have to be right in order to win, and who are sure
that "objectively and scientifically" (whatever that may mean), the
Communist system is almost certainly destined to succeed. If Communism
cannot get out of succeeding, the responsibility of the individual
Communist becomes bearable; he is still seriously and tragically
responsible for the expediting or the delaying of the inevitable, but he
does not take the mantle of God or Karl Marx and state that this is the
world as he wishes it to be and that the world of his desires will come
into existence if, and only if, he fulfills his personal
responsibilities to the utmost.
In Asia, perhaps more than in Europe, there are many persons who are
turning toward Communism, not because they think it is good or just, or
even because it is powerful, but simply because it is _likely_. Every
individual in his own life has known that he cannot undo the passage of
time, the aging of his body, the death of his loved ones, the loss of
opportunities which might have been seized, or even his own death; in
their individual lives men of all nations perform the feat,
characteristic of the human being and apparently shared by no other
species of life, of living from day to day in a constant reconciliation
of the past and present with their own estimate of the probable future.
At times in history, _that which should happen_ seems to be unleashed
like spiritual lightning and men rally in frenzy around causes which for
the year or the decade seem inspiring, terrifyingly beautiful, and
within human reach; through most of history, _that which is apt to
occur_ provides a more sober guide to the future and men prepare to live
in accordance with its standards.
In the battle of the probabilities the PsyWar of the Western powers has
been weak, high-pitched, and uncertain, while the insistence of the
Communist themes has been as monotonous and hypnotic as a jungle drum.
For better or for worse, the Communists have broken a path through to
what they think to be the future; we of other nations have not.
The chief element of anti-Communist victory--practical, sober
expectation of a certain and final downfall of the Soviet system--has
thus far been lacking on the anti-Communist side.
The Communists, on the contrary, have unreasonably, provocatively, and
untruthfully raved, screamed, shrieked, and lied to bring about that
better world which, curiously enough, their most effective cadres
considered to be an inevitable world. Thus the UN prisoners held by the
Communists during the Korean war were subjected to a constant
bombardment of Communist propaganda concerning their personal
responsibilities before history and the opportunities which they would
have to serve peace and mankind, as these noble concepts are set forth
on the Red side.
=The End of the Cold War.= If the hypothesis set forth above (page 251,
note 3), namely, that the Cold War may turn out to be unendable war
except in terms which no living man can visualize, it may be true that
appreciation of the role of psychological warfare (whatever it may later
be called) in this struggle may have to wait a few more years. One
factor often overlooked on the American side has been the _limitation of
the originators_. Propaganda, to be effective among foreign peoples or
foreign armies, cannot and should not outrun the strategic capabilities
or the political intentions of the issuing power.
It does no good for an American propaganda radio to pledge battle to the
death while the U.S. press services amiably discuss an accommodation
with the Communists. Comparably, an official propaganda plan to make
the people of France feel that the Americans love and admire them is not
very realistic if, in terms of column-inches of French press material,
unofficial American utterances are related to France to the effect that
the French are washed up, their cause in Indochina hopeless, their
economy unviable, and their political goals foolish. The years 1950-54,
during which the Korea struggle took place and in which NATO and the
European Defense Community (EDC) came to prominence, often showed a
proclivity on the part of U.S. official propagandists to go far beyond
that which their home public would support. Need it be said that the
effects on foreign public opinion were possibly deflationary?
An imaginable end to the Cold War may lie in neither victory nor defeat,
in neither accommodation nor reconciliation, but in the development of
more, newer, and different quarrels. Hostility of Protestant and
Catholic faded out in Europe when the hostility of French, Germans,
Spaniards, and other nationalities came to be more important. It is a
problem for the psychiatrist and sociologist to answer if they can. Is
it possible that semantics of war-causing quarrels can be superseded by
anything other than _different_ quarrels? A tension-free civilization is
imaginable; given the characteristics of most present-day cultures it is
scarcely more than merely _imaginable_.[48]
If within the limits of practical possibility one were to list the
hypothetical requirements for an end of the Cold War, the following
might stand forth:
(1) General war leading to destruction of either the Communist or
non-Communist systems; _or_
(2) Prolongation of the present Cold War atmosphere until new and more
interesting quarrels arise which make the present ones obsolete; _or_
(3) Reconciliation of the Communist and anti-Communist systems, by some
process not now imaginable, along the general lines of Franklin D.
Roosevelt's "Grand Design;" _or_
(4) Collapse of all major civilizations under impact of fissionable and
thermonuclear weapons; _or_
(5) Gradual erosion of the anti-Communist world and an eventual
Communist victory by sustained Communist successes short of war--or the
alternative of gradual erosion of the Communist world and the creation
of a constitutionalist and libertarian probability of victory, also
without the outbreak of general war.
It would be a brave and foolish man who would say which of these the
world should expect, but it would be a stupid staff officer who did not
anticipate at least one of them and who did not as a military officer or
government official do his best to bring about "victory" in a form which
his side could define, recognize, welcome, and achieve.[49]
=The Seven Small Wars.= The foregoing extensive discussion of the Cold
War has been included because it explains a great deal of the apparent
contradictoriness, irresoluteness, and uncertainty of the small wars
which have occurred since the end of World War II. The seven small wars
fall into a threefold pattern, if China is excluded (China is taken up
in the next section). This is the first pattern; five of the seven wars
were Asian struggles against the Western powers: Korea, Indochina, the
Philippines (in which Communist Filipinos regard the United States as
their ultimate enemy), Malaya, and Indonesia. In Korea and Indochina the
struggle came to be Communist-controlled. In Indonesia the struggle
ended in a nationalist victory. In the Philippines the struggle
degenerated into petty skirmishes between a native constitutional
government and Communist extremists. One war was an expression of
European nationalism on the soil of Asia, with the creation of the new
state of Israel. The third category is, of course, the special case
presented by the Indian-Pakistani fighting which is a struggle between
Asian nationalisms without much intervention from either European
colonialism or Communism.
The most important of these wars were the five in Korea, Indochina, the
Philippines, Malaya, and Indonesia. The Israeli struggle appears pretty
well settled as a fighting war and the India-Pakistan issue appears not
to be one which will lead to general war between those two countries.
The predominant group of wars shows variations of the same components in
different quantities.
Each was a reaction to the fall of Japan's short-lived East Asia
military empire. Each involved partial or complete resistance to
economic affiliation with the capitalist world. Each had an ingredient,
though these differed in stress and direction, of local Asian
nationalism. Except for Indonesia, each eventually became a part of the
world-wide front between Communism and anti-Communism. These wars
deserve consideration one at a time for their PsyWar content.
[Illustration: _Figure 72: Intimidation Pattern._ A Korean-language
leaflet maximizes the threat to enemy ground personnel of U. S. air
operations. The enemy dug in.]
=The Special Case of China.= None of the wars mentioned above was as
bloody or as tragic as the Chinese civil war between Communists and
Nationalists which ended with a Red victory in 1949. The China situation
is too complicated to be summed up in a single paragraph. The political,
economic, and propaganda components on each side of that war are as yet
not completely assessed.
For instance, one of the major factors in the defeat of the Nationalists
consisted of the withdrawal of the Japanese managers and technicians
from China as well as of those Japanese troops who had been maintaining
a degree of law and order in Manchuria and North China. This withdrawal
was not only sought by such "progressives" in the State Department as
John Stewart Service and Alger Hiss; it was also enthusiastically
endorsed by conservatives such as General Wedemeyer, who shipped the
Japanese out and General MacArthur, who received them. No American,
right-wing or left-wing, seriously proposed replacing the Japanese with
United States or United Nations personnel until the Nationalists had
enough trainees to manage a modern, capitalist China. By withdrawing the
Japanese the Nationalists and the Allies destroyed the political and
economic system under which the Nationalists proposed to operate and
were then astonished when the Nationalists met defeat.
In the China policy situation the contribution of Communist covert
propaganda within the United States in preventing aid to Chiang in the
crucial years of 1947, 1948 and 1949 should not be overlooked; neither
should it be overestimated nor considered the sole determinant of events
which took place within China.[50]
=PsyWar in the Indonesian-Dutch War.= A rapid and talented command of
propaganda was shown by the Indonesians in their retention of power in
the face of a Dutch landing in the islands in 1945-46. The Indonesians
were readily alert to the necessity for obtaining U.S., British,
Australian, and other foreign sympathizers. They opened propaganda
offices abroad and did an excellent job of presenting their own case.
While Indonesian combat propaganda against the Netherlands troops is not
recorded as having had much effect on Dutch morale, their use of global
strategic propaganda to support a local war was excellent. Netherlands
ships were refused docking and loading services by Australian
stevedores. American press and public sympathy ran very largely in the
Indonesian favor. Indonesian acceptance of the political concept,
"United States of Indonesia," which was dropped as soon as independence
was won, may have played a significant role in winning American
sympathy.
[Illustration: _Figure 73: Communist Wall Propaganda._ Wall messages
have been ubiquitous in China for many years, leading one wit to accuse
the Chinese of "mural turpitude." Here the ancient Chinese device has
been turned against English-reading personnel.]
Dutch military and strategic propaganda in their war with the
Indonesians suffered from uncertainty on the Dutch side as to the goals
of the war, the suspicion that a Netherlands victory would be nothing
more than a triumph of colonial capitalism, and the insistent
interference of United Nations and United States observers. The Dutch
were never able to put across the point that Indonesia derived its
nationhood from Imperial Japanese sponsorship and the Netherlands
withdrawal was dictated as much by the practical necessity of
reconciling world opinion and balancing the home budget as by the
militarily untenable nature of the Dutch enterprise.
=The Philippine War Against the Huks.= By contrast, the Republic of the
Philippines faced a very serious military situation in the challenge of
the Huk armies--tough Communist troops concentrated in central
Luzon--who waged a cruel and bitter war, rather like the struggle of the
Irish Republicans against the Black-and-Tans. By 1950 the Philippine
Government was in a serious position. There was at least the remote
possibility that if the Government continued to falter, the city of
Manila might have fallen to a Communist _coup_.
In this situation Ramón Magsaysay, as Secretary of Defense, developed
some of the most provocative and audacious anti-guerrilla operations of
the postwar period. To meet the Communist claim that the struggle was
one of the landless against the rich, he offered all surrendered Huks
resettlement in a new land project; he visited the project himself
frequently enough to make sure it remained a valuable demonstration
area. To allow the common people to help the Government, without their
suffering from Communist reprisals against themselves or their
families, he disseminated secret methods whereby the people could
communicate with the Government forces. He established a psychological
warfare office under Major José Crisol. This office was doing as good a
job of tactical PsyWar with leaflets, mimeographs, loudspeakers, light
planes, and other field and headquarters equipment as any army
installation which the author has seen. Most of the doctrine and
procedures for the operation of the office were American, but the
content of the materials was Filipino. Catholicism, Filipino patriotism,
Malayan nativism and peasant common sense were some of the factors used
to underscore the Philippine Army's appeals. In the following three
years the Huks shrank seriously although the danger could not be said to
have been eliminated altogether.
=Indochina and Political Warfare.= With devotion, often with heroism,
frequently with brilliance, the French military forces in Indochina
fought a Communist-captured nationalist movement known as the Viet Minh;
they fought despite the accompaniments of a wretched and vacillating
home policy, incredibly poor psychological relationships with the native
élite, and security situations which pass all American belief. (One
Vietnamese recently told the author that the pro-Communist Viet Minh
soldiers fought as long as they could against the French and then came
back to French territory to eat good food, visit their families, rest
and relax before returning to the field to murder more French sentries,
blow up more French patrols, or attack more French outposts.)
It ill becomes an American to criticize the French for their policy in
Indochina since it was by virtue of a U.S. strategic decision and a U.S.
logistical action that Indochina was turned first from Japanese hands
into the hands of the British in the south and the Chinese Nationalists
in the north. The British did not care much about the local situation.
The particular Chinese Nationalists in northern Indochina were mildly
sympathetic with local nationalism, but chiefly preoccupied with
stealing everything that could be put on a truck. After this ill-fated
liberation the Americans then assisted the French in transporting forces
back to Indochina. This was after much of the U.S. press and many U.S.
leaders had indicated their disapproval of French colonialism and had
given indirect but powerful encouragement to Viet Minh's rebellion
against the French. Having helped foul up the situation for the French
hopelessly, the United States then observed their return (a return which
was definitely, though indirectly, made possible only by U.S. aid to
France) with uncertainty and disquiet. It took the Americans four years
to decide that they were on the French side and even then they were not
very much on the French side.
Neither were the French.
The "French side" was an indefinable amalgam of old-fashioned French
colonialism, the membership of three small Asian states in a French
Union, and anti-Communism. The French made the mistake which the
Americans repeated when they invited the Chinese Communist general, Wang
Hsiu-ch'üan, to New York to defame the United States through the
courtesy of the United States Government, or when they tried dealing
with the Chinese Communists, fighting them, dealing with them, and
fighting with them again. When the French finally decided to seek an
all-out military victory against the Communists they set up local
governments which they themselves promptly dishonored, giving them
neither prestige nor authority enough to combat the Communist menace in
local Asian terms.
That the French should have held the Asian anti-Communist front under
these strange political circumstances is a credit to France. The
Indochinese war has been dirty, discouraging. It has often verged upon
the hopeless. The French have been criticized by the Americans in the
early period of the reoccupation of Indochina for not turning the
country over to Communist "nationalists" lock, stock and barrel; later
the Americans criticized the French because the French did not
annihilate the same "Communist nationalists" whom the Americans had
previously lauded. In the end, Dien Bien Phu and Geneva were the
inevitable concomitants of Panmunjom. Once we made "peace," the French
had to make an equally bad "peace" too.
The United States was adroit enough to obtain the immense psychological
leverage of getting the Korean war recognized as a UN war. The
Indochinese war was not made a UN war even though it was the same enemy
who was being fought--Asian Communists underwritten by Peking and
guaranteed by Moscow--in each case.
Amazing though it may seem, practical psychological warfare was almost
completely neglected by the French until the Americans supplied the
French with printing facilities for French Annamite leaflets in 1950. By
1952 the French had assigned staff officers to carry out psychological
warfare responsibilities and were making a serious effort to link up
with the other anti-Communist forces in East Asia for the purpose of
obtaining psychological warfare know-how. A considerable improvement in
tactical psychological warfare was made between 1950 and 1952. The
strategic psychological warfare position of the French in the area must
be referred back to the "battle of the probabilities," mentioned earlier
in this chapter. So long as French, Americans, and Annamites all feel
that a French defeat is quite probable and say so both publicly and
privately, it will be difficult for the French to make the Indochinese
believe that Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos are here to stay as
French-protected and anti-Communist nations.[51]
=Malaya and the MRLA.= The MRLA, or Malayan Races Liberation Army, is a
Chinese Communist guerrilla army operating in the jungles of Malaya.
Malaya (minus the island of Singapore, which is a separate Crown Colony
to itself) has been constituted in the postwar period as a federation of
Malay sultanates. The British have talked a great deal about the
self-government of Malaya, the eventual end of their own rule, and the
progress of the people. Everything, or almost everything, which the
British say is true--except for the fundamental fact that the Chinese in
Malaya can, under British rule, enjoy anything except life, purpose, and
honor.
What are "life, purpose, and honor" in basic human terms?
They are the rights to belong to something, to be a part of history, to
make one's own world move, to be a human being superior to other human
beings, to be vain, to be proud, to be self-sacrificing.
After years of war against the Chinese Communist guerrillas who have
small components of Malayans and Indians with them, the British have not
yet found a single British brigadier or major general of the Chinese
race. The world at large on the anti-Communist side has yet to hear of a
Chinese-Malayan hero who served mankind by falling martyr to the
Communist terror or by emerging as victor in valiant heroic combat.
The Chinese in Malaya, as the author has observed at first hand, are
probably more prosperous than any other Chinese have ever been anywhere
in the world. Under capitalism today the Chinese communities in Malaya
have achieved a degree of wealth, health, and education which Communist
China will be remarkable to have achieved if it survives and succeeds
for the next hundred years.
Does this not give the lie to the great Communist myth concerning
Asia--the myth accepted by many Western politicians, intellectuals, and
newspaper men--that the struggle between Communism and anti-Communism is
a struggle for living standards? that the issue is an issue of "who will
provide the best livelihood"?
On the pro-Communist side in Malaya, Chinese who are not religious and
who are known for their practicality and secularism, struggle for the
chance to go forth and suffer, to serve in an army with bad medical
service and no pensions, to face an almost certain death in the jungle,
to lose life and property (which they could keep on the British side) in
order to gain that other kind of life--life with honor and purpose, on
the Communist side.
The British meanwhile progress, no doubt. In many respects the British
administrations in Singapore and Malaya are more enlightened than some
of the local governments in the United States. But whatever the reason,
they do not seem to belong to the Chinese who live there or even to the
Malays. They are governments for the people, and not (so far as the
local people seem to judge) governments _of_ the people.
Is it reasonable to ask in the mid-1950s that decent British officers
and civil servants convert themselves into apocalyptic fanatics of a
weird composite Asian nationalism? Can the British make revolution in
Malaya when they are rather fatigued with their own Labor revolution at
home? Can we Americans, who have made nothing, absolutely nothing, out
of the heroism and romance and tradition that might have been
reconstituted as the ancient kingdom of Ryukyu (Okinawa), be in a
position to chide the British for not doing that which we ourselves do
not undertake?
The Communist magic is strong, bad magic. In North Korea it created
officers in an unreasonably short time, developed fanatics while we were
trying to develop gentlemen, and came close to defeating us in the
perilous weeks of the Pusan perimeter. In China soldiers of whom many
Americans despaired when they fought on the Nationalist side became
desperate assault infantry under Communist training. The timid and
quarrelsome Annamites who had given the French so little trouble before
Communism organized them, fought like leopards once they read Marx,
Lenin, Mao Tse-tung and Ho Chi-minh.
Was this why the Communists were able to continue in Malaya? No one has
ever accused the British Army of a lack of ingenuity. The forces who
developed desert raiders, coastal commandos, air-dropped _banditti_, and
a plethora of amusing, shocking, and audacious innovations cannot be
accused of a lack of imagination.
The British _did_ use psychological warfare in Malaya strategically,
tactically, in the field, in the cities, by radio, and by print. When
Carleton Greene was directing the British PsyWar effort from the
headquarters of that redoubtable gentleman, Malcolm MacDonald, British
Commissioner General for South East Asia, he even resorted to the device
of writing individual letters to known Communists and leaving these
letters scattered through the jungle. The British used white propaganda,
black propaganda, grey propaganda; if there had been a purple propaganda
they certainly would have tried it. Alex Josey came close to it when he
shocked the planters in Malaya by delivering socialist speeches over the
Malay radio in an attempt to pull the Left wing off the Communist bird.
Sir Henry Gurney, the High Commissioner of the Federation who was
murdered in 1952, was a veteran of irregular warfare. He had faced the
Zionist terrorists in Jerusalem and was a man without fear. His approach
to the problem of confronting Communism was _hopelessly sane_. The
Communists were offering young Chinese the intoxication of craziness, of
a mad and heroic righteousness to justify the misspending of their
lives. Sir Henry's answer was decency, goodness, security, prosperity,
authority, liberty under law. He offered everything except glamor,
terror, inspiration, and romance--
Everything except the chance to join the British side.
What kind of British side?
A British side which, like the Communist side, would welcome the makers
of the future, the builders of the next civilization, the arbiters of
history.
The Communists have presented a high bid against the U.S. and Britain as
well as the other Western powers. We have not yet overbid them. The high
bid is the opportunity to join, to belong, really to be equal, not just
legally equal, and, above everything, to share, to struggle, and to work
under conditions of heroism for a common goal.
=The Right to Join.= The West has lost a lot of the Cold War in Asia
because the Communist side could be joined and the Western side could
not be joined. There is no American party in India, but there is a
Communist party. There is no anti-Communist army to which cadres of men
from either Soviet-occupied or Soviet-free territories can be made
welcome. There is no command point for the anti-Communist struggle.
There is the promise of immense U.S. help, even the promise of British,
Colombian, Ethiopian, and other help, for Korea or other Koreas. Is
there much willingness _to be helped_? Is there any way that we can let
ordinary Asians in on our side?
The top levels of this problem are, of course, political. They must be
solved in the light of a U.S. home public which eschews crusades and
dreads adventures. At a lower level the problem becomes one for the
military staffs of the future. How can the United States, the United
Nations, or other anti-Communist forces recruit native leaders and
native followers under circumstances of dignity and honor? How can we
either learn to love the allies we have or to find allies whom we can
love? Until then much of the spiritual and organizational advantage in
Asia will fall to the Communists. We may have the better ideals, but if
people who are determined to illuminate their own lives with the
splendor of risky, heroic, or self-sacrificing action (and who insist on
doing something desperate somewhere somehow, so as to relieve the
ignominy, poverty, and monotony of their existences) cannot learn how to
join us, they will perforce join the other side.
A slight or even a substantial increase in economic welfare in the Asian
states seems to the author to favor a sharp increase in Communist
strength. When people are desperately poor or sick they cannot worry
about causes. When they become moderately well off--well enough off to
know that they are despised, poor by our standards, ignorant by our
standards--then the point of psychological frenzy comes in.
=Propaganda Techniques in the Seven Wars.= Neither in the Chinese civil
war nor in the seven other wars listed has there been much refinement of
propaganda techniques over World War II. As a matter of fact, it took
the Korean war two years to come up to the standards of Normandy. It is
amazing how many propaganda techniques had become lost arts between 1945
and 1950. The author himself flew _under_ the Chinese Communist forces
along the Han River in March 1951 when the voice plane in which he rode
as an observer had to hug the valley bottoms in order to get its message
to the Chinese ground forces past the sound of its own propellers;
instead of ingenious, up-to-the-minute gadgets to dispense leaflets the
author joined the young officers in the plane in throwing the leaflets
out of the plane door by hand. He thought ruefully about the leaflet
bombs and leaflet dispensers which had been used in Europe and in Burma,
and when he returned unharmed to Taegu he submitted one more red-hot
memorandum recommending the obvious.
[Illustration: _Figure 74: Divisive Propaganda, Korean Model._ In this
leaflet an attempt is made to show the Asians-die-for-the-Kremlin
theme.]
The strategic PsyWar self-limitations imposed by the United States on
the United States in the Korean war were also crippling. The United
States did not desire anything which a professional soldier would
recognize as victory. U.S. opinion was divided as to whether all of
Korea should be liberated by UN forces. At the policy-making
level--certainly among our allies--there was pretty general agreement to
remain at peace with the supply dumps and high command of the Chinese
Communist forces in Manchuria and China while fighting the forward
echelons of those forces in Korea. The United States would not accept
defeat nor would it seek a decisive victory because victory might have
involved the risk of war.
Under these conditions it must be pointed out that General MacArthur had
the first and only PsyWar establishment ready to operate the moment the
Korean war began. Col. J. Woodall Greene ably managed the Tokyo
headquarters for most of the period of the Korean war. The Department of
the Army showed great good judgment in bringing back Brig. Gen. Robert
McClure, who had been Eisenhower's PsyWar chief in Europe, to the new
Department of the Army's PsyWar establishment which was created on 15
January 1951 in the Pentagon as a part of Special Staff, United States
Army, with the title of Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare
(OCPW). When General McClure departed for Teheran, he was succeeded at
OCPW by Brig. Gen. William Bullock. The last period of the Korean war
found Korean local PsyWar at the headquarters of Eighth U.S. Army in
Korea (EUSAK) under the command of Col. Donald Hall, who had probably
seen more continuous PsyWar service than any other officer in the U.S.
Army.