The most important of these wars were the five in Korea, Indochina, the Philippines, Malaya, and Indonesia. The Israeli struggle appears pretty well settled as a fighting war and the India-Pakistan issue appears not to be one which will lead to general war between those two countries. The predominant group of wars shows variations of the same components in different quantities.
Each was a reaction to the fall of Japan's short-lived East Asia military empire. Each involved partial or complete resistance to economic affiliation with the capitalist world. Each had an ingredient, though these differed in stress and direction, of local Asian nationalism. Except for Indonesia, each eventually became a part of the world-wide front between Communism and anti-Communism. These wars deserve consideration one at a time for their PsyWar content.
Figure 72: Intimidation Pattern. A Korean-language leaflet maximizes the threat to enemy ground personnel of U. S. air operations. The enemy dug in.
The Special Case of China.
For instance, one of the major factors in the defeat of the Nationalists consisted of the withdrawal of the Japanese managers and technicians from China as well as of those Japanese troops who had been maintaining a degree of law and order in Manchuria and North China. This withdrawal was not only sought by such "progressives" in the State Department as John Stewart Service and Alger Hiss; it was also enthusiastically endorsed by conservatives such as General Wedemeyer, who shipped the Japanese out and General MacArthur, who received them. No American, right-wing or left-wing, seriously proposed replacing the Japanese with United States or United Nations personnel until the Nationalists had enough trainees to manage a modern, capitalist China. By withdrawing the Japanese the Nationalists and the Allies destroyed the political and economic system under which the Nationalists proposed to operate and were then astonished when the Nationalists met defeat.
In the China policy situation the contribution of Communist covert propaganda within the United States in preventing aid to Chiang in the crucial years of 1947, 1948 and 1949 should not be overlooked; neither should it be overestimated nor considered the sole determinant of events which took place within China.[50]
PsyWar in the Indonesian-Dutch War.
