Jack Cheevers, Act of War: Lyndon Johnson, North Korea, and the Capture of the Spy Ship Pueblo (2013) — a Book Review

19 April 2016

Excellent and relevant

If you remember January 1968’s USS Pueblo incident — Jack Cheever’s Act of War: Lyndon Johnson, North Korea, and the Capture of the Spy Ship Pueblo (NAL Calibre, 2013) will infuriate you all over again.

If you are too young for the ship’s name to ring the memory bell, the book will wise you up to the ways in which chains of command downwardly foist accountability onto those whom they have callously (and often selfishly) sacrificed to a variety of meat grinders of their own creation.

The great strength of this particular book is Cheevers’ hard fought inclusion of nationally embarrassing material — from previously classified sources — regarding this episode in which the North Korean military seized an American naval vessel from international waters after killing one of its crew.

The Pueblo Incident remains pertinent

Readers can conclude, using both the book and today’s news, that:

North Korea still slaps American presidential administrations around

getting inertial bureaucracies to exercise even marginal smarts is virtually impossible

and

few pinnacle commanders are up to doing their jobs competently, when faced with a crisis that requires both quick thinking and fast action.

Cheevers’ implied conclusions

The author proves that:

(i) The very slow, tiny and essentially unarmed electronic surveillance ship — USS Pueblo — was recklessly thrown into a foreseeably dangerous mission off the coast of North Korea — without proper preparation, training or orders, while burdened with ridiculous amounts of completely unnecessary classified materials and equipment, with no accompanying way to destroy them under emergency conditions.

(ii) The vessel’s commander, Lloyd M. Bucher, was unfairly scapegoated for surrendering his ship (without raising armed resistance) under circumstances that would have been both futile and contradictory to his Rear Admiral-provided instructions.

(iii) No one, except 5^th Air Force General Seth J. McKee, acted appropriately and decisively immediately after the Pueblo’s seizure.

(iv) This thematic deficiency in courageous, competent leadership remained so for a full year afterward, all the way up the chain of command to and including President and Commander in Chief, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Before Republicans get too excited about LBJ’s Democratic ineptitude during the Pueblo crisis

The same lack of competence and courage marred Republican President Richard Nixon’s succeeding administration, when a North Korean fighter jet shot an American reconnaissance plane down over the Sea of Japan on 15 April 1969, killing thirty-one US airmen. That act of war far outweighed the Pueblo fiasco, in which “only” one seaman died.

Nixon’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger afterward opined that “our conduct in the EC-121 crisis [was] weak, indecisive and disorganized.” I would add the phrase, embarrassingly cowardly as well.

Cheevers’ work is thorough and persuasively detailed

Unfortunately, his footnotes are much too limited in number and content. Most readers will forgive this because Cheevers’ text flows so well. I found the 380-page book difficult to put down.

Most emotionally moving are the many pages documenting the persistent, often daily torture that the surviving 82 member crew endured. Empathic people will find these chapters rough going. The sheer volume of cruelty testifies to the crew’s strength of will, as well as to Commander Bucher’s later recognized stalwart leadership.

The torture and interrogation section of the book is also valuable in that it demonstrates North Korea’s approach to prisoner of war interrogation and indoctrination. Similarities abound with respect to techniques once used by World War II Japan and probably still by the People’s Republic of China.

Notable throughout the crews’ account, is how well and rigidly indoctrinated North Korea’s troops and civilians are. For example, the captors could not comprehend that American “proletarians” owned automobiles. The communists’ mix of knowledgeable wile, ferocious brutality, and abysmal ignorance kept the Pueblo crew frequently off balance.

Rather than retell the Pueblo story — which the book does brilliantly — here are a two of the tale’s easily overlooked points

First, during and after this period, North Korea was routinely sent large bands of commandos over the South Korean border with instructions to murder then South Korean President Park Chung-hee and his family. These raids were also aimed at creating guerrilla style destruction.

Cheevers goes into detail about President Park’s frustration with LBJ, who in his opinion far underestimated the threat that North Korea posed.

Recall in this that the Korean War had incompletely ended only 15 years before. President Johnson’s non-retaliation (for the Pueblo seizure) against North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Il-Sung, Park believed, only emboldened the latter. South Korea was now paying the price.

Indeed, one of Johnson’s obtuse demands was that President Park send 11,000 more South Korean troops to Vietnam. Atop the fifty or so thousand South Koreans already there. As if this marginal increase was really going to make even a noticeable difference in the already hopeless (given the way it was being conducted) war.

Faced with promises of generous military aid, Park eventually dropped his counter argument that his country needed the 11,000 men to fend off North Korea’s possibly coming invasion. Readers of Act of War may tentatively conclude, as I did, that President Park was noticeably more strategically perceptive than were the American president and his culturally arrogant advisors.

Second, the Johnson Administration let North Korea repeatedly jack the United States around at Panmunjom, where American negotiators were trying to get the Pueblo’s crew released. Knowledgeable people will recall that President Nixon arguably made the same mistake with Vietnam.

One point of pride

Although Act of War is a conceit-piercing book, US military and civilian leadership coming off poorly, there is one admirable exception. I quote the following at length, so as to make a fundamentally important strategic point afterward:

Air Force Lieutenant General Seth McKee was determined to help the Pueblo. He sat at a phone-strewn table in a glass-walled room, flanked by a dozen members of his battle staff, all of them making call after call. McKee commanded the Fifth Air Force, comprising all U.S. military planes in Japan, South Korea, and Okinawa.

[After striking out on one option after another, including being refused temporary command of the aircraft aboard the USS Enterprise:]

McKee had only one card to play: his F-105 fighter-bombers at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, more than 1,100 miles from Wonsan [where the Pueblo was].

They were to fly to Osan [South Korea] Air Base, refuel, and immediately take off to attack the North Korean gunboats herding the Pueblo. The [Kadena] wing commander put [Major John] Wright in charge of the operation.

Wright got to the South Korean air base around midnight. Snow skittered across dark runways. Ground crews were hastily uploading bombs to 105s that had arrived earlier. It was much too late to prevent the capture of the Pueblo, and General McKee had called off that operation.

Now Wright’s squadron was about to be handed a new, more dangerous mission.

The major strode into the run-down flight operations building and got on the scrambler phone to Fifth Air Force.

Wright asked what his orders were.

“I want you to sink that [the Pueblo] at all costs,” his superior replied.

“All costs?” Wright asked, the implications hitting him. “Does that mean all of my twelve airplanes?”

“That’s right. I want that ship sunk. The Navy lost it, and we’re gonna sink it.”

Wright’s small band of pilots was likely to be met over Wonsan by a wall of antiaircraft fire and a horde of MiGs; the Americans’ chances of survival were virtually nil. Nonetheless, the major swung into action. He told the Osan maintenance officer to remove his jets’ drop tanks and attach more bomb racks. That meant his men wouldn’t have enough fuel to get home in the unlikely event they got away from Wonsan in one piece. But they’d have extra bombs for the job.

His pilots needed to know that no one was to leave Wonsan as long as the Pueblo remained afloat. But he couldn’t simply order them to crash into the ship; military law and custom, not to mention basic morality, prevented commanders from telling subordinates to commit suicide.

The major chose his words carefully.

“Here’s the rules: If that ship is still floating and you’re the last one alive, go back around and sink it.”

“Does everybody understand what I’m telling you?” he asked.

One pilot pulled back the corners of his eyes until they became slits. “Ah so, Major,” he said, mimicking a Japanese accent.

Wright and each of his men sat alone in a freezing cockpit, waiting for what probably would be the last flight of their lives.

For three days, [after Washington DC got involved] Major Wright and his pilots sat in their cockpits, waiting for the signal to take off . . . . But the order never came and they finally were told to stand down.

General McKee and Major Wright’s F-105 squadron demonstrated warriors’ bushido

Bushido is the warrior’s code that emphasizes strategic and tactical audacity, decisiveness, and determined commitment to martial purpose — unfrightened by and (indeed) embracing of death. Brutality and mental inflexibility are the code’s historically demonstrated primary weaknesses.

It is interesting to me that this small element of the Air Force demonstrated bushido’s positive attributes, but the Navy, to whom the Pueblo belonged, did not.

On page 77, Cheevers points out that the power-packed USS Enterprise and all its aircraft had been just 500 miles from Wonsan, when everything started going badly. Not a peep of aid cleared the carrier’s decks.

Is mindfully applied bushido a remedy for flawed thinking and misdirected actions?

During the Pueblo and EC-121 incidents, more bushido — and less cowardly dithering — might have been effective in strategically modifying the albatross of disrespect that the United States still faces today. Especially among historically martial cultures that know, if they press us long enough, we will give up and go home.

“No boots on the ground” is our conceptually unalloyed mantra today. When it instead should be — “no boots on foolish ground or for foolish purpose.”

The difference between these two formulations is conceptually striking. It is a pity that we lack the bushido to recognize the distinction.

The moral? — Highly recommended reading

Act of War should get most readers thinking about how to manifest American power in complicated geopolitical situations.

Today, North Korea still jabs sticks in our eye, while we self-destructively meddle with arguably less dangerous powers and situations, incompetently cultivating generations of bad will virtually everywhere we go.

The 1968 stupidity that marred American performance under pressure remains with us, variously located and still concealed behind a walls of secrecy and pretended oomph. Our often viciously enforced bluster creates enmity where there need have been little or none, yet lacks enforceable strength when it is tested by those infuriated with it.

There is no better prescription for hegemony lost.

People aiming for positions in strategic command should read Jack Cheevers book.

PeteFree.com

Jack Cheevers, Act of War: Lyndon Johnson, North Korea, and the Capture of the Spy Ship Pueblo (2013) — a Book Review