More Disclosure: Suppressed history, A banned classic with new introduction

Moreover, on May 24, 1951, General Bradley revealed in his testimony before the combined
Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees of the Senate that non-battle casualties, including the loss of frozen legs and arms, which had not been included in lists issued to the public, totaled an additional 72,679 casualties, among them 612 dead.

With such terrible casualties admitted and published, President Truman‘s glib talk of avoiding war by a police action in Korea appeared to more and more people to be nothing but quibbling with a heartless disregard of our dead and wounded men and their sorrowing relatives. Our battle casualties passed 100,000 by mid-November, 1951.

(ii) Before his dismissal, General MacArthur stressed his conviction that the only purpose of war is victory. In direct contrast, Secretary of Defense Marshall admitted to the Congress, in seeking more drastic draft legislation, that there was no foreseen end to our losses in Korea, a statement undoubtedly coordinated with the State Department. This acceptance of a bloody stalemate with no foreseeable end horrified MacArthur, who is a Christian as well as a strategist, and prompted a protest which was a probable factor in his dismissal. The Marshall strategy in Korea was summed up succinctly by U. S. News and World report (April 20, 1951) as a plan to bleed the Chinese into a mood to talk peace. This interpretation was confirmed by General Marshall, who was still Secretary of Defense, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees on May 7, 1951.

What an appalling prospect for America, this fighting a war our leaders do not want us to win, for when every possible drop of our blood has been shed on Korean soil the dent in China‘s 475,000,000 people (population figures given by Chinese Communist mission to the UN) will not be noticeable. This is true because on a blood-letting basis we cannot kill them as fast as their birth rate will replace them. oreover, the death of Chinese Communist soldiers will cause no significant ill-effects on Chinese orale, for the Chinese Communist authorities publish neither the names of the dead nor any statistics on their losses.

(iii) Terrible for its full and final exposure of our government‘s wanton waste of young American lives and of our State Department‘s destruction of our world position, but fortunate for its complete revelation of treason or the equivalent in high places in our government, a second installment of the Wedemeyer Report (a, above) was given to the public on May 1, 1951, possibly because of the knowledge that the MacArthur furor would turn the daylight on it anyhow. The full text of the Wedemeyer Report on Korea, as issued, was published in the New York Times for May 2, 1951.

The report was condensed in an editorial (Washington Daily News, April 10, 1951) which Congressman Walter H. Judd of Minnesota included in the Congressional Record (May 2,1951, pp. A2558-2559). Here is a portion of the Daily News editorial with a significant passage from the Wedemeyer Report:

The [Wedemeyer ] reports, which presented plans to save China and Manchuria from Communism, were suppressed until July, 1949. The report on Korea was denied to the public until yesterday. It contained this warning:

The Soviet-equipped and trained North Korean people‘s (Communist) army of approximately 125,000 is vastly superior to the United States-organized constabulary of 16,000 Koreans equipped with Japanese small arms. . .The withdrawal of American military forces from Korea would. . . result in the occupation of South Korea either by Soviet troops, or, as seems more likely, by the Korean military units trained under Soviet auspices. Those units, General Wedemeyer said, maintained active liaison with the Chinese Communists in Manchuria.

This was written nearly 4 years ago.

To meet this threat, General Wedemeyer recommended a native force on South Korea, sufficient in strength to cope with the threat from the North, to prevent the forcible establishment of a Communist government.

Since 70 percent of the Korean population was in the American occupation zone south of the thirty-eighth parallel, the manpower advantage was in our favor, if we had used it. But the sound Wedemeyer proposal was ignored, and, when the predicted invasion began, American troops had to be rushed to the scene because sufficient South Korean troops were not available. The State Department was responsible for this decision.

Thus a long-suppressed document, full of warning and of fulfilled prophecy, joined the spilled blood of our soldiers in casting the shadow of treason upon our State Department. U.N. forces, under present restraints, will not be able to win said U.S. News and World Report, on June 8, 1951. In fact, by their government‘s plan they were not allowed to win ! Here‘s how The Freeman (June 4, 1951) summed up our Korean war:

So whenever the Chinese Communists feel that they are getting the worse of it, they may simply withdraw, rest, regroup, rearm, and make another attack at any time most advantageous to themselves. They have the guarantee of Messrs. Truman, Acheson, and Marshall that they will be allowed to do all this peacefully and at their leisure; that we will never pursue them into their own territory, never bomb their concentrations or military installations, and never peep too curiously with our air reconnaissance to see what they are up to.

The truce conference between the Communists and the representatives of the American Far East commander, General Matthew B. Ridgway was protracted throughout the summer and autumn of 1951 and into April, 1952, when General Mark Clark of Rapido River notoriety succeeded (April 28) to the military command once held by Douglas MacArthur !

Whatever its outcome may be under General Clark, this conference has so far had one obvious advantage for the Communists; it has given them time in which to build up their resources in materiel, particularly in tanks and jet planes, and time to bring up more troops – an opportunity capable of turning the scales against us in Korea, since a corresponding heavy reinforcement of our troops was forbidden under our new policy of sending four divisions to Germany !

The potential disaster inherent in our long executive dawdling, while our troops under the pliant Ridgway saw their air superiority fade away, should be investigated by Congress. In letters to public officials and to the press and in resolutions passed in public meetings, the American people should demand such an investigation. Congress should investigate the amount of pre-combat training given our fliers: the question of defective planes; and crashes in the Strategic Air Command under General LeMay and others, as well as the decline under President Truman of our relative air strength in Korea and the world. For amazing pertinent facts, see Emergency in the Air, by General Bonner Fellers, in Human Events, January 23, 1952.

A peace treaty with Japan (for text, see New York Times, July 13, 1951) was proclaimed at San Francisco on September 8, 1951, after the dismissal of General MacArthur. This treaty ratified the crimes of Yalta under which, in defiance of the Atlantic Charter and of every principle of self-interest and humanity, we handed to the Soviet the Kurile Islands and placed Japan perilously in the perimeter of Soviet power. Moreover, the preamble to the treaty provides that Japan shall strive to realize the objectives of the universal declaration of human rights. Since this declaration is intended to supersede the U.S. Constitution, the Senate‘s ratification of the treaty (Spring of 1952) is thought by many astute political observers to foreshadow UN meddling within our boundaries (see Human Events, December 26, 1951) and other violations of our sovereignty.

On April 28, 1952 Japan, amid a clamor of Soviet denunciation, became a nation again. At best, the new Japan, sorely overpopulated and underprovided with food and other resources cannot for many years be other than a source of grave concern to our country. This is our legacy from Hiss, Acheson, and Dulles!

And what of the South Koreans, a people we are ostensibly helping? Their land is a bloody shambles and three million of them are dead. it was thus that we joined Britain in helping Poland in World War II. The best comment is a haunting phrase of the Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus, Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant (Where they create a wasteland, they call it peace). Thus with no visible outcome but a continuing bloody stalemate, and continuing tragedy for the South Koreans, more and more clean young Americans are buries under white crosses in Korea.

Perhaps the best summary of our position in Korea was given by Erle Cocke, Jr., National Commander of the American Legion, after a tour of the battle lines in Korea (Who Is Letting Our GI‘s Down? American Legion Magazine, May, 1951):

Our present-day Benedict Arnolds may glibly argue that it is necessary to keep Chiang and his armies blockaded on Formosa, but these arguments make no sense to our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines who have to do the fighting and dying. They see in Chiang‘s vast armies a way of saving some of the 250 lives that are being needlessly sacrificed each week because certain furtive people expound that Chiang isn‘t the right sort of person, and therefore we cannot accept his aid. Our fighting men are not impressed by these false prophets because they haven‘t forgotten that these same people not long ago were lauding Mao‘s murdering hordes as agrarian reformers.

For the life of them, and life is meant in a very literal sense, they can‘t understand why our State Department and the United Nations make it necessary for them to be slaughtered by red armies which swarm down on them from a territory which our own heads of Government make sacrosanct.

Agents of the Kremlin, sitting in the councils of the United Nations in Washington and elsewhere, must laugh up their sleeves at our utter idiocy. But you may be sure that our GI‘s are not amused. They see the picture as clearly as the Soviet agents do, but, unlike our stateside leaders, they see the results of this criminal skulduggery in the blood they shed and in the mangled corpses of their buddies.

What they cannot understand, though, is the strange apathy of the people back home. As they listen to radio reports of what is happening thousands of miles to the east of them, they are puzzled. Isn‘t the American public aware of what is going on? Don‘t they realize that their sons and husbands and sweethearts are fighting a ruthless enemy who has them at a terrible disadvantage, thanks to stupid or traitorous advisors and inept diplomacy?

This brings us to Delegate Warren Austin‘s statement (NBC, January 20, 1951) that the UN votes with us usually 53 to 5 but runs out on us when the question rises of substantial help in Korea.

The reader is now ready for and has probably arrived at the truth. The free nations vote with us because we are obviously preferable to the Soviet Union as a friend or ally, for the Soviet Union absorbs and destroys its allies.

But according to the Lebannon delegate to the United Nations, quoted above, the nations of Asia are withholding their full support of U.S. Policy because they are pained and bewildered by it.

They do not understand a foreign policy which (a) applauds the landing of Russian-trained troops on a Palestine beachhead and amiably tolerates the bloody liquidation of natives and UN officials and (b) goes to war because one faction of Koreans is fighting another faction of Koreans in Korea.

The failure to see any sense in United States policy is not confined to the nations of Asia. In
France, our oldest friend among the great powers, there is confusion also. Thus a full-page cartoon in the conservative and dignified L‘Illustration (issue of January 20, 1951) showed Stalin and Truman sitting over a chess board. Stalin is gathering in chessmen (U.S. Soldiers‘ lives ) while Truman looks away from the main game to fumble with a deck of cards. Stalin asks him: Finally, my friend, won‘t you tell me exactly what game we are playing? (Enfin, mon cher, me direz-vous a quos nous jouons exactement?). This quip should touch Americans to the quick. Exactly what game are we playing ?

How can Lebanon or France, or any nation or anybody, understand a policy which fights Communism on the 38th Parallel and helps it in the Strait of Formosa; which worships aggression in Palestine and condemns it in Korea? In the Philadelphia Inquirer (April 6, 1951) the matter was brilliantly summed up in the headline of a dispatch from Ivan H. Peterman: U.S. Zig-Zag Diplomacy Baffles Friend and Foe.

Meanwhile, amid smirking complacency in the State Department, more and more of those young men who should be the Americans of the Future are buried beneath white crosses on an endless panorama of heartbreak ridges.