Peace Table
Armistice negotiations began at the behest of the Soviets in June 195 1 and dragged on for two years. It took until July 26 even to establish an agenda for the conference. The participants decided that an armistice would require agreement on a demarcation line and demilitarized zone, impartial supervision of the truce, and arrangements for return of prisoners of war. The toughest single issue involved the disposition of POWs. U.N. negotiators wanted prisoners to decide for themselves whether they would return home; the communists, fearful of mass defection, held out for mandatory repatriation. In an effort to break the negotiation stalemate, General Mark Clark, who had succeeded Ridgway, stepped up bombing raids on North Korea. At last, during April 1953, the POW issue was resolved; a compromise permitted freed prisoners to choose sides, but under supervision of a neutral commission.
The Unhappiest Ally
After this long and frustrating process, the only individual who remained thoroughly displeased was Syngman Rhee (1875-1965), president of South Korea. Rhee desired nothing less than unification of Korea and wholly voluntary repatriation as absolute conditions for cease-fire. So he threw a monkey wrench into the proceedings by suddenly ordering the release of 25,000 North Korean prisoners who wanted to live in the South. To regain Rhee’s cooperation, the United States promised him a mutual security pact and long-term economic aid. Nevertheless, the armistice signed on July 27, 1953, did not include South Korea. Still, the cease-fire held, and the shooting war was over.
The Korean War did succeed in containing communism—confining it to North Korea—but in all other respects, this costly conflict was inconclusive, except that it provided a precedent for intervention in another Asian war. This time the war would take place in a divided Vietnam, beginning in the next decade.
The Least You Heed to Know
Jubilation at the end of World War II was short lived, as the Western capitalist nations and the eastern European and Asian communist nations squared off for a Cold War.
A policy of “containing” communism and a fear of touching off a nuclear World War III dominated American foreign policy in the postwar years.
Main Event
The major German war criminals were prosecuted in the Nuremberg Trials, which took place in that German city from November 1945 to October 1946, presided over by jurists from the Allied nations. The principal trial brought 22 German Nazi leaders to justice, of whom 12 were sentenced to death, including Wilhelm Keitel (Hitler’s closest military adviser), Joachim von Ribbentrop (German foreign minister), Alfred Rosenberg (a principal architect of Nazi genocide programs), and Martin Bormann (Hitler’s secretary). Bormann vanished after Hitler’s suicide on April 30, 1945, and was tried in absentia; in 1972, a skeleton identified as his was discovered in West Berlin. Hermann Goering, second only to Hitler in authority, committed suicide before he could be executed. Three other war criminals were given life sentences, and four received 20-year terms. Three of the first 22 tried were acquitted. Over the succeeding months, lesser criminals were tried in a series of 12 proceedings.
Word for the Day
Coined in 1947 by journalist Herbert Bayard Swope in a speech lie wrote for financier Bernard Baruch, cold war refers to the postwar strategic and political struggle between the United States (and its western-European allies) and the Soviet Union (and communist countries). A chronic state of hostility, the Cold War was associated with two major “hot wars” (in Korea and Vietnam) and spawned various “brushfire wars” (small-scale armed conflicts, usually in Third World nations), but it was not itself a shooting war. The end of Cold War was heralded in 1989 by the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Voice from the Past
The crux of the North Atlantic Treaty, which created NATO, is Article 5: “The parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.”
Main Event
On June 19, 1953, Julius Rosenberg (born 1918) and his wife, Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg (born 1915), became the first United States civilians in history to be executed for espionage. Their trial and their punishment were sources of great bitterness and controversy during the Cold War.
Julius Rosenberg, a member of the Communist party, had been employed as an engineer by the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II. He and Ethel were accused of supplying Soviet agents with atomic bomb secrets during 1944-45. Their chief accuser was Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, who had worked on the “A-bomb” project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and had fed the Rosenbergs secret information. Because Greenglass turned state’s witness, he received a 15-year sentence, whereas, under the Espionage Act of 1917, the Rosenbergs were sentenced to death on April 5, 1951. The sentence provoked protests worldwide—including accusations of anti-Semitism—but President Eisenhower, convinced of the couple’s guilt, refused to commute the sentences.
Word for the Day
The A-bomb, or atomic bomb, first tested and used in 1945, operates on the principle of nuclear fission—the splitting of the nuclei of uranium or plutonium atoms—which suddenly releases an incredible amount of explosive energy. The H-bomb (hydrogen bomb), first tested in 1952, is a fusion rather than fission device, joining the nuclei of hydrogen atoms together in an uncontrolled nuclear reaction. The hydrogen bomb releases about 1,000 times more energy than an atomic bomb.
Word for the Day
Congress never declared war against North Korea or China. Officially, the conflict was called a police action–a localized war without a declaration of war.
Stats
Just how many Chinese and North Korean troops were killed in the Korean War is unknown, but estimates range between 1.5 and 2 million, in addition to at least a million civilians. The U.N. command lost 88,000 killed, of whom 23,300 were American. Many more were wounded. South Korean civilian casualties probably equaled those of North Korea.
From the Back of the Bus to the Great Society
(1947-1968)
In This Chapter
The African-American struggle for civil rights
Start of the “space race”
Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis
Idealism and social reform in the Kennedy and Johnson years
Assassinations
With the ruins of war-ravaged Europe still smoldering, much of the world’s population remained hungry, politically oppressed, or both. But Americans, having triumphed over evil incarnate in the form of Nazi and Japanese totalitarianism and enjoying the blessings of liberty, had much to be proud of. True, the postwar world was a scary place, with nuclear incineration just a push of a button away. Childhood, which Americans prized as a time of carefree innocence, was now marred by air raid drills that regularly punctuated the school day. In an increasingly confusing world, America’s children were also menaced by a much-discussed and debated wave of “juvenile delinquency.” Yet, all in all, 1950s America was a rather complacent place—prosperous, spawning a web of verdant (if rather dull) suburbs interconnected by new highways built under the Interstate Highway Act of 1956.