795.00/8–1450
Memorandum by the Counselor (Kennan) to the Secretary of State
This memorandum is supplementary to my memorandum of August 8 containing a round-up of the present pattern of Soviet intentions.1
You will recall that attention was drawn in paragraph five of that memo to the concern which the Soviet leaders must feel over the proximity of the operations in Korea to their own frontiers and over the direct damage which could conceivably be done to their military interests by an extension of the area of hostilities.
[Page 575]In paragraph 7(c) of that memo it was also pointed out that any further direct detriment to the Soviet military establishment in the Far East resulting from hostilities in South Korea might be expected to hasten a re-entry of the Bed Army into North Korea.
According to releases from General MacArthur’s Headquarters of August 13, attacks were made August 12 by three sweeps of B–29 bombers on military (including naval) targets at Najin (Rashin), a North Korean port described in one communique as only 17 miles from the Soviet border. The attacks were made, one communique states, through heavy cloud cover, by radar guidance, and 500 tons of high explosives were dropped.
There has now come to my attention a front page story in today’s New York Herald Tribune by Ansel E. Talbert, despatched from Tokyo on August 13. This story states (a) that Rashin is “of tremendous future importance to the Soviet Union”; (b) that the Soviet Navy has been using it as a submarine base; (c) that it is particularly important to them in this respect because Vladivostok and other Soviet Far Eastern ports are ice-bound part of the year, whereas Port Arthur and Dairen are poorly situated as submarine bases; and (d) that although “officially” the attack was designed to interdict the flow of supplies to the front in Korea, actually most such supplies “are believed to have passed through Najin before the fighting began”, and reconnaissance flights conducted the same day between Wonsan and Seishin “disclosed not a single supply train or any other rail traffic moving along the entire stretch …” (Despite requests of several days’ standing we have been unable to get any information out of General MacArthur’s Headquarters for the Department about such reconnaissance flights and their results.)
Given the speed at which these planes operate, and the fact that they were bombing through an overcast, it is obvious how easily they could not only have overflown the Soviet frontier but actually have inflicted damage on the Soviet side of it. Aside from this, we must remember that this point is less than 100 miles from the entrance to the roadstead of Vladivostock and that the Soviet authorities are pathologically sensitive even to any reconnaissance activities, let alone actual bombings, in that vicinity. On top of this, we have the story apparently passed by General MacArthur’s Headquarters three or four days after the announcement that censorship had been imposed, making it entirely plain that the relationship of Rashin to the hostilities in South Korea was only a pretext for our bombing and that the real reason for it was the desire to injure the Soviet strategic position in the Far East.
It is my belief that this drastically heightens the importance and actuality of the passages in my analysis of August 8, cited above. In [Page 576] the light of this conduct on our part, which can only appear to the Soviet authorities as evidence of a deliberate decision to exploit the South Korean hostilities for the purpose of reducing Soviet strategic capabilities in the area, we must be prepared at any time for extreme Soviet reactions going considerably beyond, and therefore not fully in accordance with, the analysis I gave on August 8. In the light of this situation, it is entirely possible that a Soviet military re-entry into North Korea might occur at any time; or the Soviet Government might take other local measures, such as putting strategic bombing planes nominally at North Korean disposal, and beginning operations with them against our forces and our bases in Japan. We also cannot exclude the possibility that this evidence, as it must appear to them, of a United States intent to damage their strategic interests under cover of the Korean war, even at the price of greater heightened danger of serious complications, will naturally affect their estimate of the possibility of avoiding major hostilities, of the likely timing of such hostilities, and of the relative advantages of a Soviet initiation of such hostilities as opposed to a waiting policy based on the continued hope of avoiding them altogether.2