The Big Picture: Army in Action: The Cobra Strikes (U.S. Army Informaton Service, 1965)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I happened upon a surprisingly interesting 30-minute movie produced by the United States Army in 1965 as part of a series alternatively called The Big Picture and Army in Action. This was marked as episode 10 of a series and it was called The Cobra Strikes. The subject was the Korean War and the movie was obviously aimed as agitprop for U.S. soldiers about to be shipped off to Viet Nam for America’s second go-round in less than 20 years fighting a land war in Asia against the despicable anti-freedom forces of godless Communism (you know). It was being shown as part of a series of documentary films on American history on the C-SPAN 3 channel and was succeeded by something that actually had happened five years before the start of the Korean War: the signing of the United Nations Charter by the original 50 member countries in San Francisco in 1945. (Today there are 193 U.N. member states, many of them countries that were still colonies of European nations in 1945.) It was ironic, to say the least, to see Lord Halifax sign the charter on behalf of Great Britain when he was Winston Churchill’s principal political enemy in the early days of World War II -- after Neville Chamberlain stepped down the choice for the House of Commons was between Halifax, who wanted to cut a peace deal with Adolf Hitler; and Churchill, who wanted to fight Germany, Hitler and Nazism to the death -- and interesting that of all the people in Stalin’s government it was the relatively moderate Andrei Gromyko who signed on behalf of the Soviet Union.

The 1965 film The Cobra Strikes -- incidentally imdb.com doesn’t list this but does list another film with that title, a 1948 “B” from Ben Stoloff Productions released by Eagle-Lion just after it was formed by J. Arthur Rank after he took over PRC, which sounds interesting and potentially noir -- was pretty much what you’d expect a documentary on the Korean War to be from the U.S. government at the height of the Cold War. It begins with the post-war division of Korea into northern and southern occupation zones which, like the similar divisions of Germany in 1945 and Viet Nam in 1954, wasn’t supposed to create two separate countries. In 1948 Koreans were supposed to hold an election to determine what form of government they would have, but those dastardly Communists in North Korea wouldn’t allow the election to be held and so only the South Koreans got to vote. (Whatever they voted for, in practice they ended up with a Right-wing military dictatorship and it was only in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s that South Korea loosened up and became a multi-party republic with a relative degree of political freedom and human rights.)

In 1950 North Korea invaded South Korea and seemed on the verge of overrunning the entire country until the United States asked the United Nations to authorize a so-called “police action,” actually a full-scale military counteroffensive. At the time the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, any one of whom could have vetoed the “police action,” were the United States, Great Britain, France, Taiwan (who held the seat for “China” not only in the Security Council but the whole U.N. until 1972, when they were replaced by mainland China while Taiwan was thrown out of the U.N, on the basis of the “One China” fiction) and the Soviet Union. Inexplicably, instead of vetoing U.N. involvement against the North Koreans, the Soviet delegation walked out of the Security Council and the other four members all voted for the action -- though it was mostly American troops doing the fighting (and the dying). There were a few British units involved but almost nobody from the rest of the U.N. took part.

The Korean War was, at least according to the portrayal here, a see-saw battle in which North Korean forces pushed all the way to the South Korean capital, Seoul (phonetically spelled “Soul” on the maps shown in the film) until the U.S. and other U.N. forces pushed them back and all the way to the Northern capital, Pyongyang, before the U.S. soldiers started noticing that some of the people they had killed or captured were wearing the distinctive knit uniforms of the People’s Liberation Army of China. The show depicts the amphibious landings at Pusan and Inchon and the difficulty of holding the beachheads against North Korean opposition (though they probably didn’t have anywhere nearly as tough a time as the Allied invaders had had at Normandy six years earlier), and while the film shows General Douglas MacArthur assuming command of the “United Nations Police Force” in 1950 it doesn’t mention President Harry Truman’s firing of MacArthur over a year later. The narrator just names different generals in charge of the U.S. Army and the fighting goes on.

The show mentions that peace negotiations began as early as 1951 but got hung up on questions of prisoner exchange -- it doesn’t mention the fascinating routine of criticism/self-criticism the North Koreans and Chinese put captured Americans through that eventually, when they got released and talked about their experiences in ways that sounded like they’d absorbed their captors’ point of view, they were denounced as having been “brainwashed.” (In the late 1970’s I read a fascinating book called Prisoners of Liberation by Allyn and Adele Ricketts, who had been U.S. academics on a study tour of China in the early 1950’s when they were arrested and put through the process, and the main point was that when they tried to explain what they had learned about the world and the U.S.’s imperialistic role in it when they came home, people shrugged their shoulders and said, “Brainwashed.”) And of course the film’s narrator can’t resist making the comment that a lot of the captured Chinese prisoners didn't want to go home because they'd rather live in the relative freedom and prosperity of the South.

One of the many issues unaddressed by this film is that though the elements of a peace deal were in place as early as 1951 it took two years of more fighting, killing and dying before the agreement was reached -- and the Korean War was ultimately the first in U.S. history at least since 1815 that didn’t end in a convincing American victory. Instead the Korean peninsula returned to the status quo ante and North and South Korea became two separate countries with two very different economies -- South Korea a capitalist powerhouse (though, like Japanese capitalism, South Korean capitalism is organized largely along feudal lines, with a handful of families forming cartels that between them own pretty much everything; unlike Britain, France and the U.S., Japan and Korea went from feudalism to capitalism without a revolution or a civil war, and it shows) and North Korea so ill-developed that famous pictures of that region of earth from space show huge lights from China and South Korea at night, while North Korea is almost totally dark.

Indeed, as I pointed out to the friend I was watching this with, North Korea today remains a basket case economically; for all its pretensions to be running its economy on juche (“economic self-sufficiency”), North Korea is kept alive only by massive amounts of aid from China. If China ever decides for whatever reason to shut off the spigots of aid to North Korea, North Korea will collapse almost overnight. The Cobra Strikes is an historically interesting summary of the Korean War, obviously made from the point of view of a fighting force which had lost men in Korea and aimed at the people whom they were about to send into another Asian quagmire in Viet Nam -- which would end not just in a “stalemate” but an actual defeat for the U.S. despite our massive investment of time, money and lives. The Cobra Strikes, available on archive.org at https://archive.org/details/TheCobraStrikes, is at once an O.K. summary history of the Korean War and a fascinating glimpse into an American attitude that would lead us into considerably worse misadventures around the world, from Viet Nam to Afghanistan and Iraq.