While You Slept Other Books by John T. Flynn THE ROOSEVELT MYTH THE ROAD AHEAD: AMERICA'S CREEPING REVOLUTION While You Slept OUR TRAGEDY IN ASIA AND WHO MADE IT by JOHN T. FLYNN THE DEVIN-ADAIR COMPANY New York · 1951 Copyright 1951 by John T. Flynn. All rights reserved. Permission to reprint material from this book must be obtained in writing from the publisher. For information write: The Devin-Adair Company, 23 East 26th St., New York 10, N. Y. First Printing, November 1951 Second Printing, November 1951 Third Printing, December 1951 Fourth Printing, January 1952 MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Contents I While You Slept 9 II The Red Deluge 13 III China's Two Wars 14 IV Two Great Designs 25 V Architects of Disaster 30 VI The Road to Korea Opens 44 VII The Great Whitewash 54 VIII The Pool of Poison 59 IX The Hatchet Men 71 X Left Thunder on the Right 82 XI The Press and Pink Propaganda 88 XII Red Propaganda in the Movies 98 XIII Poison in the Air 108 XIV The Institute of Pacific Relations 116 XV The Amerasîa Case 134 XVI The Great Swap 145 XVII The China War 151 XVIII The Blunders That Lost a Continent 157 XIX America s Two Wars 178 References 187 While You Slept I While You Slept As June 1950 drew near, America was giving little attention to a place called Korea. Secretary General Trygve Lie of the United Nations was urging that Chiang Kai-shek's govern- ment be expelled from the United Nations to make room for the Chinese Communist government of Mao Tse-tung. The British delegation strongly urged that proposal. Secretary of State Acheson said he could not vote for it but that if the United Nations decided to admit Red China he would not use the veto—he did not think the veto applied in such a case.1 In Seoul, Korea's first elected parliament was assembling. John Foster Dulles, representing the United States, was there and addressed the parliament. He hailed it as the product of a free election in which 80 per cent of the voters had par- ticipated. The British Minister said he had seen many new countries enter upon the adventure of representative govern- ment. But he knew of none "whose progress was so fast and so solid." 2 On Sunday morning, June 25th, as Americans were reading this in their papers, the Communist armies of North Korea had crossed the border in an invasion of the southern repub- lic. Two days later President Truman announced: "I have 9 10 While You Slept ordered the United States air and sea forces to give the Korean government troops, cover and support." In another day American ground and air forces were fully engaged in South Korea in what the President called "a police action." Thus we became enmeshed in an obscure tangle of circum- stances, many of which belong to the as yet dimly perceived world of the East but which are related through more than one connection with the shattered and collapsing civilization of Europe. The purpose of this book is not to record a history of the war. Its aim is to discover how our great, free nation, guarded against such a disaster by a Constitution and a long heritage of ideals, could be brought into such a struggle, involving ob- jectives so dimly seen, stretching on to problems so insoluble, and promising stresses on our economic and political system that might well end in its utter deformity. Consider what has happened. The President of the United States, in complete defiance of the Constitution, plunged us without consultation with Congress into a distant Oriental war in pursuit of ends no one understands and involving costs and consequences we cannot measure. The President would not do this—he would not dare—if by some obscure processes there had not been created in our minds a collection of as- sumptions and attitudes that had broken down completely the normal resistance which our people would raise against so strange and daring an enterprise. Before this was possible, something, over a course of years, had to be done to the minds of the American people. The pur- pose of this book is to explore the techniques by which this job was done and to identify, if possible, the agencies and the men responsible for it. I am aware that the reader will find himself asked to believe statements which seem in themselves incredible. In these last 20 years this country has become a laboratory for the dark and insidious science of modern revo- lutionary propaganda. It is difficult for the American to real- ize that the ideas, the prejudices, the convictions he holds While You Slept 11 may have been deliberately—though slyly—planted in his mind by men who have a settled purpose in performing that operation, who possess the instruments of thought control and understand how to operate them. Miracles can be wrought by those who know this art. Never has there been so large and so generally sophisti- cated a population so defenseless against such an enterprise as the people of America. Generous in their attitudes, dis- turbed by a long siege of war, exposed to the most powerful engines of propaganda the world has ever known, they have been a mark for the experts trained in their use. Here we may recall the parable of Jesus in the early days of His mission—the parable of the man who sowed good seed in his field. But when the blade was sprung up and brought forth good fruit, there were tares also. And when his servants went to him and told him what they had found, he said—an enemy hath done this, while we slept. When we had ended our great war, we found among the prizes of victory disasters we had not bargained for. It is the purpose of this book to attempt to describe how these disasters were planned—while we slept. 12 While You Slept II The Red Deluge Before we proceed further it will be well for us to form some notion of the enormity of the disaster which has overtaken Europe and Asia. The reader is therefore asked to look care- fully at the map on the opposite page. It gives merely the black and white outlines of these two continents. The shaded portion marks the vast stretch of the continental land mass of Europe and Asia that has fallen under the dominion of the Communist world. What remains of Europe and Asia outside this great dark smudge represents that part of these old con- tinents which have not yet fallen under the control of the Soviet world. This still unconquered part appears on the map as a sort of small fringe—all that remains of the non-Com- munist old world. It would of course be untrue to suppose that all of this still unconquered portion contains the ele- ments essential to the free society. The map, therefore, under- estimates rather than exaggerates the gravity of the fate which has overtaken Europe and Asia. A few simple figures will illustrate this in another way. In Europe and Asia, Russia dominates an area of over 13 million square miles, while all the other countries cover only approxi- mately seven million square miles. 13 14 While You Slept All the countries of Europe and Asia outside the Russian- dominated areas have a population of a little over one billion people. Russia controls a population of 779 million. However, there is this difference. Russia dominates her area and her peoples. The area and peoples outside are split into 38 separate and independent nations. And the end is not yet. The voracious appetite of the Communist world is still unsatisfied. If Russia succeeds in her immediate objectives in Asia she will add more than a hundred million more to her world of slaves. m China's Two Wars In order to understand that train of events which led us into Korea we must realize that they had their origin in the strug- gle in China which began over 40 years ago. During the Sec- ond World War we looked upon events in China as shaping themselves around a struggle between Japan and the Chinese government. But for many years China was engaged at the same time in two separate wars. One was her war with Japan. The other was Tier war with Russia. Nothing could obscure the real meaning of the whole story more than to suppose that Chinas Two Wars 15 China was at war with Japan and that Russia was her ally against Japan. There were two separate wars carried on re- morselessly by China's two historic enemies—Russia and Japan. Japan fought China by invading her with an army, first in 1931 and again in 1937. Russia fought China with an army of Chinese revolutionaries, directed and armed by Russia. Rus- sia's war in China was precisely the same as Russia's war in Korea. In China, Chiang Kai-shek was fighting communism with the aim of restoring peace and setting up a republic. To understand what we did in China, you might try to imagine our government doing in Korea what we did in China—call- ing on the Koreans to unite, demanding of Syngman Rhee that he form a coalition government with the North Koreans and threatening that if he refused we would cut off all arms and supplies. The only difference between Russia's war on China and her war on Korea was that in Korea we aided and armed the South Koreans to fight communism, while in China, incredible as it may seem, we actually told the Chinese gov- ernment to do what Russia wanted—unite with the Com- munists.