People's Volunteer Army
The People's Volunteer Army, officially the Chinese People's Volunteers, was the armed expeditionary forces deployed by the People's Republic of China during the Korean War. Although all units in the PVA were actually transferred from the People's Liberation Army under the orders of Chairman Mao Zedong, the PVA was separately constituted in order to prevent an official war with the United States. The PVA entered Korea on 19 October 1950 and completely withdrew by October 1958. The nominal commander and political commissar of the PVA was Peng Dehuai before the ceasefire agreement in 1953, although both Chen Geng and Deng Hua served as the acting commander and commissar after April 1952 following Peng's illness. The initial units in the PVA included 38th, 39th, 40th, 42nd, 50th, 66th Corps; totalling 250,000 men. About 3 million Chinese civilian and military personnel had served in Korea throughout the war.
Background
Formation
Although the United Nations Command forces were under United States command, this army was officially a UN "police" force. In order to avoid an open war with the U.S. and other UN members, the People's Republic of China deployed the People's Liberation Army under the name "volunteer army".About the name, there were various opinions. According to some scholars during the mid-1990s, after the PRC made the strategic decision to send soldiers to Korea, the first name of this army was "support army." However, Huang Yanpei, the vice premier of the Government Administration Council of the Central People's Government at that time, suggested that the name "support army" might cause the international community to assume that China was sending soldiers as an act of direct aggression against the United States. Therefore, the army's name was modified to "volunteer army" while different unit designations and footings were used instead, to give the impression that China did not intend to declare war against the U.S. but rather that Chinese soldiers were only present on Korean battlefields as individual volunteers. On the other hand, some recent studies show that the change was not only Huang's advice. On 7 July 1950, the name had already been changed to "volunteer army" by Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai on his manuscript about the decision of the army's clothing and flags.
Despite arguments on the changing from "People's Support Army" to "People's Volunteer Army", the name was also a homage to the Korean Volunteer Army that had helped the Chinese communists during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War. It also managed to deceive the U.S. intelligence and the UN about the size and nature of the Chinese forces that entered Korea. They later realized that the PVA was the PLA's North East Frontier Force, with other PLA formations transferred under NEFF's command as the Korean War dragged on. But the result was that they still admitted the name, "People's Volunteer Army", in order to minimize the war within the Korean Peninsula and prevent escalation of the war.
Decisions to enter war
On 30 June, five days after the outbreak of the war, Zhou decided to send a group of Chinese military intelligence personnel to North Korea to establish better communications with Kim as well as to collect firsthand materials on the fighting. One week later, on 7 July, Zhou and Mao chaired a conference discussing military preparations for the Korean Conflict. Another conference took place on 10 July. Here, it was decided that the Thirteenth Army Corps under the Fourth Field Army of the People's Liberation Army, one of the best-trained and best-equipped units in China, would be immediately transformed into the Northeastern Border Defense Army to prepare for "an intervention in the Korean War if necessary". On 13 July, the CMCC formally issued the order to establish the NEBDA, appointing Deng Hua, the commander of the Fifteenth Army Corps and one of the most talented commanders of the Chinese Civil War, to coordinate all preparation efforts.On 20 August Zhou informed the UN that "Korea is China's neighbor... The Chinese people cannot but be concerned about a solution of the Korean question". Thus, through neutral-country diplomats, China warned that in safeguarding Chinese national security, they would intervene against the UN Command in Korea. U.S. President Harry S. Truman interpreted the communication as "a bald attempt to blackmail the UN", and dismissed it. Mao ordered that his troops should be ready for action by the end of August. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, by contrast, was reluctant to escalate the war with a Chinese intervention.
On 1 October the Soviet ambassador forwarded a telegram from Stalin to Mao and Zhou requesting that China send five to six divisions into Korea, and Kim sent frantic appeals to Mao for Chinese military intervention. At the same time, Stalin made it clear that Soviet forces would not directly intervene. In a series of emergency meetings that lasted from 2 to 5 October, Chinese leaders debated whether to send Chinese troops into Korea. There was considerable resistance among many leaders, including senior military leaders, to confronting the U.S. in Korea. Mao strongly supported intervention, and Zhou was one of the few Chinese leaders who firmly supported him. Mao appointed Peng Dehuai commander of the Chinese forces in Korea. Peng made the case that if U.S. troops conquered Korea and reached the Yalu River, they might cross it and invade China; the Politburo agreed to intervene in Korea. On 4 August, with a planned invasion of Taiwan aborted because of heavy U.S. naval presence, Mao had reported to the Politburo that he would intervene in Korea when the PLA's Taiwan invasion force was reorganized into the PLA North East Frontier Force.
On 8 October, the day after UN troops crossed the 38th parallel and began their offensive into North Korea, Chairman Mao issued the order for the NEFF to be moved to the Yalu River, ready to cross. Mao redesignated the NEFF as the People's Volunteer Army. To enlist Stalin's support, Zhou and a Chinese delegation arrived in Russia on 10 October. They conferred with the top Soviet leadership, which included Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lavrentiy Beria and Georgy Malenkov. Mao saw intervention as essentially defensive: "If we allow the U.S. to occupy all of Korea... we must be prepared for the U.S. to declare... war with China", he told Stalin.
Mao delayed his forces while waiting for Soviet help, and the planned attack was thus postponed from 13 October to 19 October. Soviet assistance was limited to providing air support no closer than from the battlefront. The MiG-15s in PRC colours would be an unpleasant surprise to the UN pilots; they would hold local air superiority against the F-80 Shooting Stars until newer F-86 Sabres were deployed. The Soviet role was known to the U.S., but they kept quiet to avoid any international and potential nuclear incidents. It has been alleged by the Chinese that the Soviets had agreed to full scale air support, which never occurred south of Pyongyang, and helped accelerate the Sino-Soviet split.
Stalin initially agreed to send military equipment and ammunition but warned Zhou that the Soviet Air Force would need two or three months to prepare any operations. In a subsequent meeting, Stalin told Zhou that he would only provide China with equipment on a credit basis and that the Soviet Air Force would only operate over Chinese airspace, and only after an undisclosed period of time. Stalin did not agree to send either military equipment or air support until March 1951. Mao did not find Soviet air support especially useful, as the fighting was going to take place on the south side of the Yalu. Soviet shipments of matériel, when they did arrive, were limited to small quantities of trucks, grenades, machine guns, and the like.
In a meeting on 13 October, the Politburo decided that China would intervene even in the absence of Soviet air support, basing its decision on a belief that superior morale could defeat an enemy that had superior equipment. Immediately on his return to Beijing on 18 October, Zhou met with Mao, Peng and Gao, and the group ordered 200,000 PVA troops to enter North Korea, which they did on 19 October. UN aerial reconnaissance had difficulty sighting PVA units in daytime, because their march and bivouac discipline minimized aerial detection. The PVA marched "dark-to-dark", and aerial camouflage was deployed by 05:30. Meanwhile, daylight advance parties scouted for the next bivouac site. During daylight activity or marching, soldiers were to remain motionless if an aircraft appeared, until it flew away; PVA officers were under order to shoot security violators. Such battlefield discipline allowed a three-division army to march the from An-tung, Manchuria, to the combat zone in some 19 days. Another division night-marched a circuitous mountain route, averaging daily for 18 days.
China justified its entry into the war as a response to what it described as "American aggression in the guise of the UN". Chinese decision-makers feared that the American-led invasion of North Korea was part of a U.S. strategy to invade China ultimately. They were also worried about rising counterrevolutionary activity at home. MacArthur's public statements that he wanted to extend the Korean War into China, and return the Kuomintang regime to power reinforced this fear. Later, the Chinese claimed that U.S. bombers had violated PRC national airspace on three separate occasions and attacked Chinese targets before China intervened.
The collapse of the North Korean Korean People's Army in September/October 1950 following the Battle of Inchon, the Pusan Perimeter offensive and the UN September 1950 counteroffensive alarmed the PRC government. The PRC had issued warnings that they would intervene if any non-South Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel, citing national security interests.
On 15 October Truman traveled to Wake Island to discuss with UN Commander General Douglas MacArthur the possibility of Chinese intervention and his desire to limit the scope of the Korean War. MacArthur reassured Truman that "if the Chinese tried to get down to Pyongyang there would be the greatest slaughter."