Lessons for Britain and Europe from a distant battlefield...

Looking at Ukraine through the lens of the Korean War

The flurry of almost panicked announcements this week from the Secretary of State for Defence, the Chief of the General Staff and senior NATO officers about the parlous state of Europe’s defences in the face of a burgeoning threat from a re-militarising and recalcitrant Russia, has bought mixed emotions, to me at least. The first, obviously, is ‘quelle surprise?’ The dramatic disarming of Britain’s defences during the past two decades has been an astonishing act of self-harm which has been obvious to all but those in government who seem to have absorbed the attitude of the 1920s that the world will never again see conventional war in Europe. Unless you’ve been living under a rock readers will recognise this to be the subject of mine and General Lord Dannatt’s book on the British Army between the wars. The question for us is, could this product of semi-comatose politicians prove fatal? One clearly hopes not, but the clear evidence of history is that disarmament only helps one side, and its not the one that thinks that wars belong to history.

The war raging in Europe since February 2022 brings to mind, as these things tend to do for historians (and proof that the study of war retains political utility), a conflict which began 73-years ago in the warm afterglow of the end of the Second World War. It has remarkably similar characteristics to that between Russia and Ukraine, and may yet prove to be an unfortunate model upon which the end of the war in Ukraine pans out. This was, of course, the war fought in Korea between June 1950 and July 1953. On 25 June 1950 the leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a country only accepted by the newly forming Communist bloc and not the rest of the world (the Republic of Korea had been accepted as the legitimate government of Korea by the United Nations) launched a devastating surprise attack on the South. Dictators often use surprise against their sleepy democratic neighbours, lulled into pacific drowsiness over time by self-absorption and complacency. In this case Kim Il-sung’s attempt to subvert the rule of law was subverted by rapid action by a United Nations Security Council that found itself temporarily without the USSR, and the equal determination by President Harry S Truman and the British Labour Prime Minister, Clement Attlee to resist aggression. Both men were driven by memories of the West’s pre-war appeasement of Hitler and, earlier, of Japan in Manchuria, and acted to send troops to Korea to turn back the tide of blatant North Korean illegality.

The war was subsequently played out in several phases that will not surprise anyone looking closely at Ukraine. Following the sudden decapitation of the North Korean advance after MacArthur’s dramatic flanking manoeuvre at Inchon, the North Koreans were pushed back deep into their own territory, only for the Chinese, in very large numbers, to join the fray. After some toing and froing the front then settled down to one that is physically represented by the demilitarized zone today, a border that has been frozen ever since the cessation of hostilities in July 1953. There are some interesting aspects to the two years of war that followed the arrival of the Chinese in October 1950 and the creation of a front line that demonstrated many more comparisons  with the Great War than it did with the Second. Among several I would suggest there was, first of all, a desire by those fighting the war – the West on the one hand and China and the Soviet Union on the other – for it to be contained, and not to extend beyond the physical geography of Korea. Both sides were clear about the terrible prospects the world would face if the war were to expand outside of the Korean peninsula.

Second, both Britain and the United States had reduced their armed forces savagely following the end of the Second World War. The reductions weren’t as dramatic as those of 1919, but they were still sufficient to ensure that Britain had no expeditionary capacity, and had to magic-up troops from Hong Kong that had not prepared or trained for the warfighting that was to face them in Korea. Plus ça change. Eventually a whole division was deployed, of two brigades, with an infantry battalion each from Australia and Canada and an artillery regiment from New Zealand. They all fought magnificently, and the Imjin River, Kapyong and the Battle of the Hook have gone down in British and Commonwealth history as remarkable achievements against overwhelming odds. What makes these battles all the more significant is that the majority of British troops deployed in the Commonwealth Division – at least 60% in the infantry regiments – were National Servicemen with an average age of 19. In other words, Britain’s under-manned and over-committed army couldn’t rely on full-time professionals to do the job, because the country just didn’t have enough. Britain had to dig deep into its reserves of ‘manpower’ to meet contingencies for which it had not planned. Again, plus ça change. It has lessons for the UK’s near-to-medium term, facing an army currently under-manned to the point of incapacity. As the CGS warns in a speech today, we may find ourselves in a situation in the not too distant future where we have no choice but to invite our young men and women to do the unthinkable, and consider putting the defence of their country first in a struggle in Europe that threatens to sweep all the trifling torments of current political discourse into the rubbish bin. Will the young people of this country respond in a way that the National Servicemen did in 1950? Let’s hope, perhaps for their sake, that we don’t have to find out, but the very fact that we are having these conversations, two years on from Russia’s unprovoked and illegal adventure into a country that doesn’t belong to them, seems remarkable.

Third, the war on the Korean Peninsula absorbed very large numbers of troops. Some 20 Divisions (a division comprises between 15-20,000), only one of which was British/Commonwealth, were occupied in holding a line against several hundred thousand North Koreans and Chinese, backed by the USSR. Despite some of the nonsense one hears today about the unnecessity for mass on the modern battlefield, the opposite is in fact the case. One only hears politicians making such ridiculous assertions, not soldiers. All wars are vast consumers of blood and treasure. It’s the lack of trained troops, as the Ukrainians have discovered, that so often constrains the military stratagems of those trying to fight wars. Likewise, one of the defining characteristics of Korea, as it is today in Ukraine, is the necessity for large quantities of accurate, indirect fire. Artillery dominated the conflict in Korea to an extent that we in the West have completely forgotten, but that the Ukrainians (and Russians) have relearned. Indeed, as one of the historians of the Korean War observed, during the Third Battle of the Hook, which came to a bloody climax on 28/29 May 1953, ‘greater concentrations of artillery were brought to bear on a 1,000-yard front than at any time since 1918.’ The Ukrainian battlefield is looking the same way.

Finally, the war in Korea is not yet over. No peace deal was concluded in July 1953. Instead, the cessation of hostilities was a product of pragmatism and exhaustion, not political will. With neither side willing to back down, a modus vivendi has developed in which both sides – actually, one side in particular – rattles its sabres regularly, but in which war has been averted for the previous 75-years. But the world has been left with a dangerous uncertainty in Asia which for this whole period of time has been allowed to suffocate East-West relations and occasionally threaten wider, regional, war. Could this be a foretaste of what happens in Ukraine? Certainly. Stalemates on the battlefield do not always lead, as Korea demonstrates, to peace. The modern world is the product of a number of such imbroglios, which the politicians of the day prove unable to resolve. Korea was one. Ukraine looks likely to be the next. Unless Ukraine can secure a decisive military advantage and which forces Russia to negotiate a peace that may or may not return all of its eastern provinces back to its pre-2014 state, Europe is destined to be left with an unresolved scar across the Continent that will remain for as long as neither side is able to reverse it.