Citizen Clark Reporting

FROM THE DANUBE TO THE YALU (369 pp.)--Mark W. Clark--Harper ($5).

Like any good general, Mark Wayne Clark has always fought to win. Nothing in his character or in his World War II experience could leave him content with anything less. Yet in his new book, From the Danube to the Yalu, he finds it necessary to write, in the very first paragraph: "In carrying out the instructions of my government, I gained the unenviable distinction of being the first United States Army commander in history to sign an armistice without victory."

By the time Clark became commander in chief in the Far East in May 1952, the U.S. Government had given up the idea of a military victory in Korea. Mark Clark passionately believed that such faintheartedness had to be banished, that bases and airfields beyond the Yalu should be bombed, and that Chiang Kai-shek's offer of Formosa divisions ought to be accepted. He said as much. Clark believed that the result would not be World War III but a powerful brake on Communist aggression everywhere.

General Clark never got his way, but from his frustrating experiences with Communists in Europe and Asia has come a book that, more authoritatively than any other, shows what the U.S. was up against in Korea. Candid and clear, From the Danube to the Yalu has the added advantage of being written by a man who is no longer on active duty. Retired in 1953, Mark Clark, 58, is now president of South Carolina's historic military college, The Citadel.

Lessons from a Robot. Clark went to Asia after two years as U.S. High Commissioner in Austria, where he got an on-the-scene grounding in fundamental Communist mentality and method. His Russian opposite number in Vienna was Marshal Konev, a pleasant enough fellow at a diplomatic reception. But "Konev, the social companion, and Konev, the servant of world revolution, were two different beings . . . He was a mental robot saying only what had been written for him, as though his tongue moved only when wound by a key in the Kremlin." So, in Korea, it came as no surprise to Clark when North Korea's General Nam II sat in dead silence for 131 minutes rather than answer a direct question during the armistice talks, or that he planned the prisoner-of-war riots on the South Korean islands and used them for propaganda purposes. Says Clark: "The Communists at Panmunjom weren't really talking to us. They were using us ... In the end we got the cease-fire only because the enemy had been hurt so badly on the field of battle."

Clark found that North Korea's two best commanders, Marshal Kim II Sung and General Nam II, had been officers in the Russian army in World War II, and that Russian antiaircraft units were actively fighting in Korea. He underrates neither the Russians nor the Chinese as adversaries, believes the Chinese learned fast and wound up with a stronger army than the one they started with. Never during the time he was in Korea, says Clark, did the U.N. command have the military means in Korea to win a decision in the field. Since Clark speaks only for May 1952 on, this does not contradict General Van Fleet's claim that a real chance to win existed in 1951 and was passed up.

Blunt Recommendations. Clark is never less than frank. He can express his admiration for President Syngman Rhee the patriot and his irritation with Rhee the devious politician. He is equally blunt in his recommendations for the future:

1) get out of Korea after telling Communism that new aggression will mean all-out war, and after telling Rhee that an attack to the north would make him an aggressor who could expect no help;

2) build up the armies of South Korea, Indo-China and Japan; 3) build up the equivalent of NATO in the Pacific.

Mark Clark learned what negotiators with the Communists have always learned: that the only argument they respect is force. He rattles no sabres but neither does he harbor any illusions. Like all decent men, he was glad that "the armistice had ended the killing. But when I signed the armistice, I knew, of course, that it was not over--that the struggle against Communism would not be over in my lifetime. The Korean war was a skirmish, a bloody, costly skirmish, fought on the perimeter of the free world."

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