On October 8, 1952, the United States unilaterally terminated the Panmunjom negotiations, and the Korean War once again reached an impasse.
Since the end of the Fifth Campaign to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea on June 10, 1951, the situation on the Korean battlefield has become more and more "strange."
At that time, new China drove the United Nations army to the 38th line, and the United States also retained the regime of Syngman Rhee, and the two sides achieved their own strategic goals. Although the United States occupies a huge advantage in the sea and air, china and the United States are still evenly matched in the ground battlefield, and in the case that neither side can completely eliminate the other side or even change the situation of the confrontation on the 38th line, armistice negotiations are the best way to withdraw from the war.
But the problem was that Stalin, who had the initiative, refused to give in, and China and the United States were still at loggerheads over the repatriation of prisoners of war, so the armistice negotiations became a second battlefield that was more anxious than battlefield confrontation.
When the United States unilaterally withdrew from the Panmunjom negotiations, it meant that the Korean War was completely plunged into a stalemate of "fighting and fighting, and talking and talking together".
But this is obviously not the situation that the United States wants to see, after all, as a superpower at that time, the main opponent of the United States was still the Soviet Union, and if it fell into the superstar battlefield for a long time, it would be detrimental to global hegemony. So the United States is more desperate than we are to get out.
The arrival of the 1952 U.S. presidential election seemed to bring about a turnaround in the situation in North Korea.
In May 1952, Eisenhower resigned as Commander-in-Chief of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's European Allied Forces, returned to China to run for president, and was nominated as a Republican presidential candidate in July of that year.
At that time, the United States was dragged down by the Korean War, and the post-war economic prosperity had long ceased to exist, and the people were increasingly dissatisfied with the US government. In such a situation, the hero who commanded the Normandy landings was almost universally expected, and Eisenhower publicly promised in his presidential campaign that if he was elected president, he would personally go to Korea and end the war.
Although Truman wanted clark, the newly appointed commander-in-chief of the United Nations Forces, to cheer on the Democrats in a beautiful battle on the Korean battlefield, Shangganling eventually became a sad ridge for the United States.
In this situation, Eisenhower overwhelmingly defeated his rival Stevenson to become the 34th president of the United States.
After the election results were announced, a relieved Truman congratulated Eisenhower, saying that if Mr. President still wanted to go to North Korea, the Presidential Landline Independence would be ready to be dispatched.
Eisenhower certainly wanted to go, on the one hand, this was his promise to the voters when he ran for the presidency of the United States; on the other hand, he was of course deeply fascinated by war as a military man. Imagine that even Truman, who was a civilian-born man, personally flew to Wake Island to meet with MacArthur, so why did Eisenhower not personally go out to the front line of North Korea to inspect?
On December 2, 1952, the newly appointed U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower arrived in Seoul with his secretary of defense and attorney general. At the same time, U.S. Senate President Bledmay, Pacific Fleet Commander Merzefu, Far East Commander Clarke, and 8th Army Commander Van Vliet also gathered in Seoul. In the face of such a large lineup of US inspection teams, Syngman Rhee, who had long since lost his family, rekindled his ambition to reunify the Korean Peninsula like chicken blood and organized a mass parade to reflect South Korea's high fighting spirit.
But that's not what Eisenhower wanted, and he looked north for 20 minutes south of the 38th parallel and concluded that "any situation would be very difficult."
Three days later, Eisenhower set off for his home country and stopped at Wake Island, where Truman and MacArthur used to meet. Here, Eisenhower and his new team made a detailed plan for how to end the war.
From Eisenhower's point of view, as president of the United States, he naturally had a good wish to bring the United States out of the quagmire of the Korean War. But as a soldier, Eisenhower could not accept the embarrassing situation in which the United States paid for the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers and still gained nothing.
Although at the beginning of the Korean War, Eisenhower once said that "since our country has resorted to force, it must ensure success" can completely break its promise. But the problem is that the opponent of the United States is the Chinese Volunteer Army, whose weapons and equipment are far behind the United Nations Army, and the sense of immediacy of the superpower's defeat to the "sick man of East Asia" makes Eisenhower, who has a strong sense of honor, completely unacceptable, in fact, not only Eisenhower, but the entire United States is difficult to accept.
In addition, the Republican bigwigs who supported their rise to power at that time, such as Dulles, McCarthy and others, are basically behind the shadows of arms and media tycoons, and they are strongly advocating continuing to fight for the sake of maximizing their own interests.
So although Eisenhower vowed to cease war during the campaign, when he sat on the throne of the president of the United States and sought his own government in his position, Eisenhower's thinking gradually transformed into:
"Not only to fight, but also to win".
Although the United States could not win the war from the military's intuition, let alone be decent, Eisenhower was not only a soldier at the moment, but also the president of a country, so he soon did what most American presidents did at his inauguration on January 20, 1953: Lying.
Eisenhower said: "We already knew that there was no way to end the Korean War simply and quickly. But through my personal knowledge on the front lines, at least I was prepared for this difficult task. ”
And this "preparation" is the so-called "Korean Plan" formulated by him and his colleagues on Wake Island.
According to the archives later declassified by the United States, Eisenhower's "preparation" mainly included the following aspects:
1. Allow the Chiang Gang to participate in the war
The outbreak of the Korean War gave bay islands a historical opportunity to resurrect, so the chairman of the committee has repeatedly said that he will send troops to Korea to participate in the war and repay the blessing of the United States. To this end, MacArthur also went to Bay Island to communicate with the chairman of the committee, but the then US President Truman was worried that the expansion of the war would cause direct confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union and finally vetoed it.
And Eisenhower's coming to power undoubtedly made the chairman of the committee ignite the desire to go on an expedition to North Korea.
On February 2, 1953, Eisenhower issued the first State of the Union address, lifting the status of the Bay Island "neutralization", announcing that the Seventh Fleet would no longer be used to "protect" Red China, which implied that at this moment, the Bay Island was already an ally of the United States and would fight side by side with the United States.
2. Bombing Mainland China
Since Eisenhower's affectionate look on the 38th Line, he has decided that the United Nations army will be difficult to break through in the Korean battlefield, after all, the Korean Peninsula is mostly mountainous terrain, which is not conducive to the development of modern weapons.
The naval and air superiority of the United States is even more difficult to exert, so Eisenhower decided to use his strengths and avoid his weaknesses, expand the battlefield to China's own territory, and weaken China's war potential by attacking China's own territory.
As early as the outbreak of the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, China formulated three kinds of plans to deal with the expansion of the war, including a comprehensive invasion of China by the United Nations army, an invasion of the coast, and the confinement of the war to the Korean Peninsula.
In the case of defeat, MacArthur also tried countless times to affect the war on China, and scolded Truman and other politicians for tying his hands and feet. And now that Eisenhower is president of the United States, no one will stand in the way of his ambitions.
3. Drop the atomic bomb
According to the archives declassified by the US War Department in recent years, in fact, as early as the early stage of the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, that is, the dangerous moment when the Volunteer Army beat the United Nations army to the 38th Line, MacArthur proposed to Truman a crazy plan to use the No. 26 atomic bomb to "turn defeat into victory".
Faced with the embarrassing situation of the defeat of the Un soldiers, Truman finally chose to agree, so the UN forces at the time carried out a simulated bombing of Pyongyang and in December 1950 transported the atomic bomb to an aircraft carrier near the Korean Peninsula.
However, with the gradual stabilization of the Korean war situation after the third is the battle, the atomic bomb plan was also stranded.
Eisenhower saw it as a "decent truce," a great killer of victory. Compared to MacArthur's "temporary clinging", Eisenhower's plan was more elaborate. For example, in order to test the killing effect of the atomic bomb on the ground troops, the United States specially selected a group of American soldiers to participate in the atomic bomb test, and the soldiers personally experienced the killing effect of the atomic bomb 11 miles away.
4. Support the French invasion of Vietnam
Although France surrendered during World War II with a thunderous and bell-ringing sound, after the war France threw itself into the struggle to return to the colonies, especially Indochina.
However, by this time, Ho Chi Minh's North Vietnam had long been reborn and had received strong support from China, which made the reborn France more and more miserable in the face of the reborn Vietnam.
At this critical moment, the United States came, in order to squeeze China's influence out of the Indochina Peninsula, the United States provided a lot of support to the struggling French allies, which gave France no reason not to thank the Eight Generations of American ancestors.
The U.S. intervention in Indochina has also set a precedent for the United States to invade Vietnam, which is another huge abyss facing the United States.
It should be said that these plans are quite comprehensive, and the commander-in-chief of the United Nations Army, Clark, also quickly put together an "8-52 Operational Plan", planning to go north on a large scale and extend the front line from Pyongyang to Wonsan.
But Eisenhower's adventurism was once again met with great resistance.
Similar to the November 30, 1950, when Truman hinted that the United States was going to use the atomic bomb, British Prime Minister Attlee rushed to Washington to stop it, just as the United States was preparing to "do a big job", the United States' allies Britain and France jumped out again, especially British Prime Minister Churchill, who sharply expressed his opposition to "releasing Chiang Kai-shek" and continuing to expand the Korean War.
The fundamental reason why Britain and France did not give face was that at this time, Britain and France, as a traditional colonial empire, were anxious for the surging independence movement in the colonies.
As emerging superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union have a highly consistent attitude on the colonial issue, that is, to promote the independence of the third world and to strike a blow to colonial empires such as Britain and France.
The brilliant victory of the volunteer army on the Korean battlefield also made the broad masses of the people of the third world see the possibility of resisting imperialist rule, so Britain and France and other countries felt more and more serious threats, especially the Egyptian revolution, which directly threatened Britain's rights and interests in the Suez Canal, and the Algerian insurrection directly threatened the foundation of Africa, so Britain and France and other allies once again sang against the United States.
With a high probability of not winning the battle and allies most likely parting ways, Eisenhower was quick to instigate. At a NATO meeting in Lisbon, portugal, in 1953, Western European countries called on the United States to see the serious crisis facing European countries and end the Korean War as soon as possible.
At that time, China made a "procrastinating" decision on the US negotiations. Under such circumstances, on February 22, the commander-in-chief of the United Nations Forces, Clark, through the International Committee of the Red Cross, sent a report to Peng Dehuai and Kim Il Sung, suggesting that the sick and wounded prisoners of war be exchanged first, which received a positive response.
On March 5, Stalin died, and then the Panmunjom negotiations resumed on April 26, after resolving the issue of the repatriation of prisoners of war on both sides, all the obstacles to the armistice negotiations were removed, and after solving the tumor of Syngman Rhee, the two sides finally signed an armistice agreement on July 27, marking the final conclusion of the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, and the Chinese Volunteer Army finally won a great victory after two years and nine months of bloody struggle.
And when we look back and carefully examine Eisenhower's operation of shouting and shouting and killing after he came to power, it is not difficult to find that this is actually Eisenhower's clever and bitter plan, because he knows very well that the United Nations army on the Korean battlefield is still unable to win, and how can the war be won after the war is expanded? You must know that the Soviet Union at that time had the possibility of crushing the United States at any time.
Therefore, Eisenhower's high-profile demand for the expansion of the war was nothing more than to satisfy the appetite of the domestic arms tycoon and the vanity of the United States. Through the fire in the backyards of the British and French allies, Eisenhower also found the steps down the donkey.
There are many omissions, please axe correction.
I am The History of Quiet Night and look forward to your attention.