korean war photo essay

Korean War: Classic Photos by David Douglas Duncan

Five years after the end of World War II, American soldiers were fighting again, the time in Korea. Here Marine Capt. Francis "Ike" Fenton pondered his fate and the fate of his men after being told that his company was nearly out of ammunition, 1950.

US Marine Captain Francis "Ike" Fenton in despair as he is told that his company is almost out of ammunition while trying to hold off a heavy counter-attack by North Korean forces. (Photo by David Douglas Duncan /The LIFE Images Collection)

Written By: Ben Cosgrove

Few people have lived as long, as varied and as complete a life as David Douglas Duncan. And certainly no photographers ever enjoyed a longer, more varied or more complete career than the Missouri native who became one of the indispensable photojournalists of the 20th century.

Born in Kansas City, Mo., on Jan. 23, 1916, Duncan started taking pictures for newspapers in the 1930s; joined the U.S. Marines after Pearl Harbor; made some of the most indelible photos to come out of World War II and, 20 years later, Vietnam. He documented civil strife and wars in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and he captured extraordinary beauty in environments as disparate as the west of Ireland and the deserts of America’s Southwest. He befriended and photographed people such as Picasso and Cartier-Bresson, and he produced the single greatest portfolio of pictures to emerge from the Korean War.

Here, LIFE.com presents a gallery of his celebrated pictures from America’s “Forgotten War.”

Several years before his death in 2018 at age 102, LIFE.com spoke with Duncan about his memories of the conflict — and his hope, in the end, that he might “show something of what a man endures when his country decides to go to war.”

Of his photograph of a Marine captain near the Naktong River after an attack by North Korean troops as ammunition ran dangerously low and reinforcements were nowhere in sight Duncan had written in his 1951 book, This Is War! : “Ike Fenton, drenched and with the rain running in little droplets from his bearded chin, got the news. His tattered Baker Company Marines had only those few rounds in their belts remaining. If the Reds were to launch one more attack they would have to be stopped with bayonets and rifle butts.”

But that attack never came. The Marines held the muddy, blasted, blood-drenched hill. “Radio communication was knocked out by the rain that day,” Duncan told LIFE.com, the recollection still vivid more than six decades later, “and Fenton had to shout most of his orders and sent runners when shouting wouldn’t do. God, he was a cool one. He never lost his head.”

Pictures bring back  visceral memories, and Duncan recounted the circumstances around the making of some of his classic photos in a voice at once firm and touched with wonder at the immediacy of his own recall; at the horrors and heroism he witnessed; at the fact that he was there, recording it all.

“I cabled LIFE’s editors in August [1950] from Tokyo,” Duncan said, “and I told them I was heading back to Korea to try and get what I called ‘a wordless story’ that conveyed the message, simply, ‘This is war.’ Not long after that I was covering the fighting near the Naktong River, and I made the picture of Marines running past a dead enemy soldier, their fatigues absolutely soaked to the chest with mud and muck and god knows what else. And this ended up as the cover image for the book, This Is War! , when it came out a year later.”

From the hellish heat of summer to the arctic freeze of winter, Duncan traveled with Marines, documenting the grinding, torturous lives they led and that troops everywhere have always led in war zones the world over.

“It was forty below zero during the retreat from Chosin Reservoir,” Duncan recalls of one especially appalling battle in the winter of 1950. “And the wind chill! The wind was barreling down from Manchuria and must have made it closer to fifty or sixty degrees below zero. It was so damn cold that my film was so brittle it just snapped, like a pretzel. But I managed to unload and load the camera under my gear and get some film in there, and I got some usable shots.”

The two-week battle at Chosin, while ending with 30,000 United Nations troops fleeing from at least 60,000 Chinese soldiers that surrounded them, is seen as a decisive battle for one primary reason: it showed that outnumbered allied forces could battle through encircling enemy lines, while at the same time inflicting heavy casualties.

While recalling the unspeakable violence and gnawing deprivation of those years, Duncan makes a point of praising the Americans’ South Korean allies. “The thing that comes to mind right away, right now, when looking at these pictures again,” Duncan said, “is that at no time at no time did any Marine feel he had to look around to see what the South Koreans were doing behind him. The Marines in Korea never feared ‘friendly fire’ or artillery coming from the South Koreans from their allies like they did later in Vietnam, fighting with the South Vietnamese. The Koreans could be trusted.”

The Korean War lasted for roughly three years, from June 25, 1950 when North Korea invaded the South until July 27, 1953, when the United Nations Command, the North Korean People’s Army and the Chinese People’s Volunteers signed an armistice agreement. However, the South Korean president, Syngman Rhee, refused to sign the document meaning that, technically, North and South Korea remained at war.

Five years after the end of World War II, American soldiers were fighting again, the time in Korea. Here Marine Capt. Francis “Ike” Fenton pondered his fate and the fate of his men after being told that his company was nearly out of ammunition, 1950. David Douglas Duncan

American Marines raced past a dead enemy soldier in Korea, September 1950. David Douglas Duncan

Wounded when a mine blew up his Jeep, an ambulance driver sobbed by the side of the road after learning that a friend was killed in the blast, Korea 1950. David Douglas Duncan

“Corporal Leonard Hayworth … shows his utter frustration as he has crawled back from his position only to learn that the ammo is gone. Coda: At the last moment, supplies arrived and the men were able to hold their position.” From David Douglas Duncan’s 1951 book, This Is War! David Douglas Duncan

A wounded American Marine was carried on stretcher improvised from a machine gun, Korea 1950. David Douglas Duncan

A column of American Marines marched down a canyon road dubbed “Nightmare Alley” during their retreat from Chosin Reservoir, Korea, 1950. David Douglas Duncan

Marines retreated from the Chosin Reservoir, Korea, 1950. David Douglas Duncan

American Marines marched down a canyon road dubbed “Nightmare Alley” during their retreat from Chosin Reservoir, Korea, 1950. David Douglas Duncan

A weary American Marine hooded against the cold during the grim retreat from Chosin Reservoir, Korea, winter 1950. David Douglas Duncan

A weary, exhausted Marine huddled against the bitter cold during the retreat from Chosin Reservoir, Korea, winter 1950. David Douglas Duncan

A dazed, hooded Marine clutched a can of food during his outfit’s retreat from the Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War, December 1950. David Douglas Duncan

The fight for Seoul, Korea, 1950. David Douglas Duncan

“This,” Duncan told LIFE.com of a picture made during the fight for Seoul, “is the best picture I made in Korea of civilians—a family running down stairs, a father holding a baby, tanks firing away. Those tanks are taking fire from North Koreans right down the street!” David Douglas Duncan

An American Marine slept in his halted jeep while a puppy whined in his ear during the retreat from the Chosin Reservoir, December 1950. David Douglas Duncan

American Marines passed bodies of fallen comrades during the retreat from the Chosin Reservoir, December 1950. David Douglas Duncan

Marines rested after making it through the canyon road known as Nightmare Alley during the retreat from the Chosin Reservoir, December 1950. David Douglas Duncan

Marines filed past a truck loaded with dead troops during the retreat from the Chosin Reservoir, December 1950. David Douglas Duncan

LIFE photographer David Douglas Duncan in Korea. David Douglas Duncan

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The Korean War: Behind the Battlefront

On the 70th Anniversary of the Korean War Armistice, Werner Bischof’s work stands as a powerful reminder of the human cost of the conflict, which marked a pivotal moment in the photographer’s practice

Werner Bischof

On June 25, 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea, marking the start of the Korean War. What followed was a savage conflict that claimed the lives of millions. The invasion followed the intensification of low-level fighting, which had been taking place along the two countries’ temporary border for years. Korea had been divided at the 38th parallel following the end of World War II; the Soviet Army took hold of the North, while US forces established control in the South with a view to eventually unifying the country. Both occupying powers established civilian regimes. However, ongoing resistance from the Soviet Union and North Korea’s new leaders towards attempts at forming one government ensured that Korea remained split.

One year into the fighting, Werner Bischof journeyed to the region to investigate the human cost of the conflict, having just completed an assignment for Magnum in India. On the 70th anniversary of the armistice agreement that halted the hostilities and left Korea divided down a de facto boundary that still exists today, we look back at Bischof’s historic coverage of the war.

Bischof had been invited to join Magnum in 1948, following his extensive documentation of life across Europe in the aftermath of World War II. This was a transitional moment for the photographer who had received an art school training and originally intended to become a painter. Although he did not pursue this route, Bischof began his photographic career working in a studio, creating beautiful images dominated by natural forms and abstract shapes.

However, the experience of documenting post-war Europe made him question his role as a photographer and he became committed to using the medium as a tool for social change. He officially joined the agency in 1949, alongside its four founding members. Moving away from his fine art roots, Bischof continued to embrace a more photojournalistic approach and, from 1951 to 1952, dedicated himself to documenting social and political issues across Asia.

"His photographs had a tendency towards the absolute — a combination of beauty with truth"

- ernst haas.

The photographer’s first stop was India, where he worked on a number of projects including his renowned photo-essay Famine Story, which shed light on the severe famine ravaging the country. Bischof soon became set on traveling to Korea, determined to expose the suffering of civilians caught up in the war.

On the morning of July 5, 1951, he joined ten other correspondents from around the world on a flight to Seoul. “I just had to see for myself how this war was being conducted. (Something else was at play too: I found it important to show the human, the civilian side of the story. The Koreans who were chased out of their homes,)” he wrote in a letter to his wife, Rosellina Bischof, sent from Tokyo on July 11, 1951.

Arts & Culture

After the War

Despite making the transition to photojournalism, Bischof’s relationship with photography remained complex. He particularly struggled with the realities of being a photojournalist and was angered by the prevalence of, what he regarded as, sensationalistic and careless reporting. In the same letter to Rosellina he described his first impressions of Seoul: “Among these ruins, the press center shone as the sole lit block, hundreds of journalists. It seemed to me as if we were vultures on the battlefield, always out for the sensationalistic …” However, it was a desire to go beyond the shocking images strewn across newspapers’ front pages that drove him on. So, as he had done in India, and post-war Europe before, Bischof looked beyond the immediate and produced a poignant documentation of those behind the battlefront.

"It seemed to me as if we were vultures on the battlefield"

- werner bischof.

This deeper and more considered approach to reporting is a defining characteristic of Magnum photographers, but one that was shaped by Bischof’s artistic background too. “I always and in every way go too deep into the subject matter, and that is not journalistic,” he wrote in a letter to Robert Capa, sent from Tokyo on September 9, 1951.

His artistic roots had also equipped him with an appreciation of beauty, which Bischof translated from his studio work into his documentary practice, including the work he produced in Korea. “His photographs had a tendency towards the absolute — a combination of beauty with truth: a stone became a world, a child was all children, a war was all wars,” observed the photojournalist Ernst Haas, an early Magnum colleague.

Theory & Practice

100 Years of Werner Bischof

Magnum photographers.

The Forgotten Village

After investigating war-torn Seoul, Bischof traveled to Sanyang-ri, a small village nestled in  one of the many valleys of central Korea; an area that had become a no man’s land for troops in battle. “Not a single native Korean male is tolerated in this war zone, not a woman, not a child, only soldiers,” observed Bischof in the report for Magnum Photos, dated July 8, 1951, which he wrote to accompany his images. Bischof accompanied a small Civil Assistance group as they evacuated the inhabitants of this forgotten village. As was the photographer’s intention, the resulting photo story sheds light on the harsh realities for civilians caught up in the conflict.

In his report, Bischof described the desperate scenes he encountered: starving and ill civilians, many of whom were reluctant to leave their homes. The Civil Assistance group moved from house to house, providing clothes, food and medical help. Bischof followed, photographing and making notes as the team evacuated the village and brought its inhabitants to a nearby rendezvous , where they received further assistance.

“In front of another house, a small skeletal body sits in the dazzling sunlight, crouches naked on the floor, absolutely covered in flies. Near to her, her sixteen-year-old brother is unable to use his limbs. A shaven-headed figure in the hut takes no notice. We think it is a child, but the interpreter says it is a thirty-year-old woman,” reads an excerpt from the report.

Escape From North Korea

Chien-chi chang.

Prisoner’s Island

In January 1952 Bischof reluctantly traveled to Koje-Do Island in South Korea to document a United Nations re-education camp for Chinese and North Korean prisoners. On hearing the news that a number of prisoners had been shot, a colleague he was traveling with urged him to go. “I was against it, but John thought it very important — so we flew off, as if it were a Sunday excursion, journalists from around the world, joking cheerful,” he wrote.

The camp was spread over a large area spanning two valleys and was home to around 160,000 North Korean and Chinese prisoners at its height. Journalists were able to explore relatively freely, but were prohibited from talking to inmates.

The Photographs of Early Magnum Member Werner Bischof

"we cannot deny that what we are doing here is political manipulation".

Bischof characteristically focused on the prisoners, creating a series of images documenting their everyday lives and the United Nations attempts at reeducating them. His writing from the trip sheds light on his critical views of the situation: “We cannot deny that what we are doing here is political manipulation and an attempt to make these people grasp the ideas behind our own view of life.”  

The photo story was subsequently published in LIFE in March 1952. Bischof’s negative reception of the editors’ selection of images reflected his issues with photojournalism more broadly: “It is difficult to take photographs in a prison camp, to hold onto your humanity, and subsequently to have the best pictures discarded by the censors. I sometimes ask myself whether I have become just another “reporter,” a word that I have always hated so much.”

Werner Bischof: In His Nature

Bischof was deeply affected by the suffering he witnessed in Korea. His images stand as a powerful testament to the massive civilian cost of the war, which remains unresolved to this day. Following his work in Korea, Bischof went on to spend five months in Japan, before traveling to Hong Kong, and then on to Indochina. He remained committed to photography until his untimely death in a road accident in the Andes on the May 16, 1954.

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Memory Bank Multiple Perspectives on the Korean War

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Multiple Perspectives on the Korean War

But as with all historical interpretation, there are other perspectives to consider. The Soviet Union, for its part, denied Truman’s accusation that it was directly responsible. The Soviets believed that the war was “an internal matter that the Koreans would [settle] among themselves.” They argued that North Korea’s leader Kim Il Sung hatched the invasion plan on his own, then pressed the Soviet Union for aid. The Soviet Union reluctantly agreed to help as Stalin became more and more worried about widening American control in Asia. Stalin therefore approved Kim Il Sung’s plan for invasion, but only after being pressured by Chairman Mao Zedong, leader of the new communist People’s Republic of China.

A historian’s job is to account for as many different perspectives as possible. But sometimes language gets in the way. In order to fully understand the Korean War, historians have had to study documents, conversations, speeches and other communications in multiple languages, including Korean, Chinese, English, Japanese and Russian.

In 1995, the famous Chinese historian Shen Zhihua set out to solve a major problem posed by the war. Many people in the west had argued for decades, as Truman did, that North Korea invaded South Korea at the direction of the Soviet Union. Skeptical of that argument, Zhihua spent 1.4 million yuan ($220,000) of his own money to buy declassified documents from Russian historical archives. Then, he had the papers translated into Chinese so he could read them alongside Chinese government documents.

Zhihua found that Stalin had encouraged Mao Zedong to support North Korea’s invasion plan, vaguely promising Soviet air cover to protect North Korean troops. However, Stalin never believed that the United States and the UN would enter the war, and was reluctant to send the Soviet Air Force because he feared direct confrontation with the United States. When the United States landed at Incheon, Mao recognized that the United States and the UN could quickly overrun North Korea. At that point, he decided to support North Korea with or without Soviet aid, as he was determined to stop the Americans. Stalin eventually did send in the Soviet Air Force, but only after pressure from Mao. Zhihua argued that since China decided to take the lead, the Soviet Union played a weaker role in the war than most western historians believed.

The North Koreans had their own view. They argued that the war began not with their invasion of the south, but with earlier border attacks by South Korean leader Syngman Rhee’s forces, ordered by the United States. The DPRK maintains that the American government planned the war in order to shore up the collapsing Rhee government, to help the American economy and to spread its power throughout Asia and around the world.

Journalist Wilfred Burchett reported on those border incidents prior to the North Korean invasion:

“According to my own, still incomplete, investigation, the war started in fact in August-September 1949 and not in June 1950. Repeated attacks were made along key sections of the 38th parallel throughout the summer of 1949, by Rhee’s forces, aiming at securing jump-off positions for a full-scale invasion of the north. What happened later was that the North Korean forces simply decided that things had gone far enough and that the next assault by Rhee’s forces would be repulsed; that- having exhausted all possibilities of peaceful unification, those forces would be chased back and the south liberated.”

In addition to these perspectives, there are others that still need to be fully studied and understood in the west. Certainly the conflict was fueled and abetted by American, Soviet and European and Chinese designs. But, as historian John Merrill argues, Korean perspectives on the conflict need to be better understood. After all, before the war even began, 100,000 Koreans died in political fighting, guerilla warfare and border skirmishes between 1948 and 1950.

Put simply, Koreans across the peninsula had different ideas about what the future of their country would be like once free of foreign occupation. It is up to us to better understand those perspectives. Only then will we have a fuller understanding of the Korean War, its legacy and its influence on the modern world.

American veterans James Argires, Howard Ballard and Glenn Paige provide their own perspectives on the origins of the conflict.

[ Video: James Argires – Perspectives ]

[ Video: Howard Ballard – Perspectives ]

[ Video: Glenn Paige – Perspectives ]

More History

Prewar Context: Western

North Koreans Stream Toward Pusan

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Photo Essay: The Korean War (1950-1953)

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Five short years after the close of WWII, Australia would become embroiled in the US-led invasion of the Korean Peninsula. On 28 June 1950, then-PM Robert Menzies committed the RAN’s Pacific assets to the ‘Forgotten War’; followed soon by No. 77 Squadron (RAAF) and rotating RAR contingents. 

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After the Chinese-backed North crossed the 38th parallel, the UN Security Council swiftly pushed through UNSC Resolution 82, calling on all members to support the pushback operation as of 25 June 1950. Australia, New Zealand, the US, the UK, and Canada would all join the fight in the days to follow; with the frigate HMAS  Shoalhaven  stationed in Japan as part of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (and the destroyer HMAS  Bataan on its way to replace the latter), Menzies wasted no time in committing both of these vessels to Korea. 

Days later, No. 77 Squadron began sorties over enemy territory, flying American P-51D Mustangs. Less prepared for a surprise outbreak of war, the Australian Army entered the fray on 28 September 1950, landing at Busan (Korea's second city, located at the southern tip of the peninsula). They would assist the 27th British Commonwealth Brigade (and the subsequent 1st Commonwealth Division) through to the signing of the Korean Armistice on 27 July 1953. 

This photo essay traces the deployment of Australian forces and assets to Korea, with a particular focus on RAR contingents and the human component.

Korea, 1950

The 38th parallel

The invasion

Hmas shoalhaven.

Sailors of Shoalhaven

No. 77 Squadron

A well-deserved break

3RAR (Pt. I)

3RAR (Pt. II)

3RAR: a group portrait

Administrative duties

A moment of respite

George Holland

The final parade

1RAR returns

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Re-Enacting the Korean War

The battle between the North and South, both real and imagined Photographs by Kim Jae-Hwan / AFP / Getty Images

• South Korea's Case for How the Cheonan Sank
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• Cultural Critique

Seen through the Camera Obscura: Life Photographs of the Korean War and Cold War Anxiety of the American Self

• Junghyun Hwang
• University of Minnesota Press
• Number 121, Fall 2023
• pp. 138-161
• 10.1353/cul.2023.a905077
• View Citation

Additional Information

• Buy Article for $19.00 (USD)

The Korean War as seen and shown by Life 's photographic eye constitutes a contested geography in mapping the Cold War and locating America's place in it. Seen through the camera obscura of Life , Korea is conceived as a "terra incognita" of American imagination, and in turn, the magazine as the self-proclaimed national looking glass proves itself to be an interesting peep-box—a kaleidoscope of the American ways of "seeing" the war in Korea, the Cold War, and Americans themselves in the world. Specifically, the article situates Life 's correspondent David Douglas Duncan's photo-essays on the Korean War in the intersections of American and Korean cultural histories, examining them through the lens of Cold War liberalism, which she argues taps deeper into the American frontier myth.

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The korean war 101: causes, course, and conclusion of the conflict.

North Korea attacked South Korea on June 25, 1950, igniting the Korean War. Cold War assumptions governed the immediate reaction of US leaders, who instantly concluded that Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin had ordered the invasion as the first step in his plan for world conquest. “Communism,” President Harry S. Truman argued later in his memoirs, “was acting in Korea just as [Adolf] Hitler, [Benito] Mussolini, and the Japanese had acted ten, fifteen, and twenty years earlier.” If North Korea’s aggression went “unchallenged, the world was certain to be plunged into another world war.” This 1930s history lesson prevented Truman from recognizing that the origins of this conflict dated to at least the start of World War II, when Korea was a colony of Japan. Liberation in August 1945 led to division and a predictable war because the US and the Soviet Union would not allow the Korean people to decide their own future.

Before 1941, the US had no vital interests in Korea and was largely indifferent to its fate.

Before 1941, the US had no vital interests in Korea and was largely in- different to its fate. But after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his advisors acknowledged at once the importance of this strategic peninsula for peace in Asia, advocating a postwar trusteeship to achieve Korea’s independence. Late in 1943, Roosevelt joined British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek in signing the Cairo Declaration, stating that the Allies “are determined that in due course Korea shall become free and independent.” At the Yalta Conference in early 1945, Stalin endorsed a four-power trusteeship in Korea. When Harry S. Truman became president after Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, however, Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe had begun to alarm US leaders. An atomic attack on Japan, Truman thought, would preempt Soviet entry into the Pacific War and allow unilateral American occupation of Korea. His gamble failed. On August 8, Stalin declared war on Japan and sent the Red Army into Korea. Only Stalin’s acceptance of Truman’s eleventh-hour proposal to divide the peninsula into So- viet and American zones of military occupation at the thirty-eighth parallel saved Korea from unification under Communist rule.

Deterioration of Soviet-American relations in Europe meant that neither side was willing to acquiesce in any agreement in Korea that might strengthen its adversary.

US military occupation of southern Korea began on September 8, 1945. With very little preparation, Washing- ton redeployed the XXIV Corps under the command of Lieutenant General John R. Hodge from Okinawa to Korea. US occupation officials, ignorant of Korea’s history and culture, quickly had trouble maintaining order because al- most all Koreans wanted immediate in- dependence. It did not help that they followed the Japanese model in establishing an authoritarian US military government. Also, American occupation officials relied on wealthy land- lords and businessmen who could speak English for advice. Many of these citizens were former Japanese collaborators and had little interest in ordinary Koreans’ reform demands. Meanwhile, Soviet military forces in northern Korea, after initial acts of rape, looting, and petty crime, implemented policies to win popular support. Working with local people’s committees and indigenous Communists, Soviet officials enacted sweeping political, social, and economic changes. They also expropriated and punished landlords and collaborators, who fled southward and added to rising distress in the US zone. Simultaneously, the Soviets ignored US requests to coordinate occupation policies and allow free traffic across the parallel.

Deterioration of Soviet-American relations in Europe meant that neither side was willing to acquiesce in any agreement in Korea that might strengthen its adversary. This became clear when the US and the Soviet Union tried to implement a revived trusteeship plan after the Moscow Conference in December 1945. Eighteen months of intermittent bilateral negotiations in Korea failed to reach agreement on a representative group of Koreans to form a provisional government, primarily because Moscow refused to consult with anti-Communist politicians opposed to trustee- ship. Meanwhile, political instability and economic deterioration in southern Korea persisted, causing Hodge to urge withdrawal. Postwar US demobilization that brought steady reductions in defense spending fueled pressure for disengagement. In September 1947, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) added weight to the withdrawal argument when they advised that Korea held no strategic significance. With Communist power growing in China, however, the Truman administration was unwilling to abandon southern Korea precipitously, fearing domestic criticism from Republicans and damage to US credibility abroad.

Seeking an answer to its dilemma, the US referred the Korean dispute to the United Nations, which passed a resolution late in 1947 calling for internationally supervised elections for a government to rule a united Korea. Truman and his advisors knew the Soviets would refuse to cooper- ate. Discarding all hope for early reunification, US policy by then had shifted to creating a separate South Korea, able to defend itself. Bowing to US pressure, the United Nations supervised and certified as valid obviously undemocratic elections in the south alone in May 1948, which resulted in formation of the Republic of Korea (ROK) in August. The Soviet Union responded in kind, sponsoring the creation of the Democratic People’s Re- public of Korea (DPRK) in September. There now were two Koreas, with President Syngman Rhee installing a repressive, dictatorial, and anti-Communist regime in the south, while wartime guerrilla leader Kim Il Sung imposed the totalitarian Stalinist model for political, economic, and social development on the north. A UN resolution then called for Soviet-American withdrawal. In December 1948, the Soviet Union, in response to the DPRK’s request, removed its forces from North Korea.

South Korea’s new government immediately faced violent opposition, climaxing in October 1948 with the Yosu-Sunchon Rebellion. Despite plans to leave the south by the end of 1948, Truman delayed military withdrawal until June 29, 1949. By then, he had approved National Security Council (NSC) Paper 8/2, undertaking a commitment to train, equip, and supply an ROK security force capable of maintaining internal order and deterring a DPRK attack. In spring 1949, US military advisors supervised a dramatic improvement in ROK army fighting abilities. They were so successful that militant South Korean officers began to initiate assaults northward across the thirty-eighth parallel that summer. These attacks ignited major border clashes with North Korean forces. A kind of war was already underway on the peninsula when the conventional phase of Korea’s conflict began on June 25, 1950. Fears that Rhee might initiate an offensive to achieve reunification explain why the Truman administration limited ROK military capabilities, withholding tanks, heavy artillery, and warplanes.

Pursuing qualified containment in Korea, Truman asked Congress for three-year funding of economic aid to the ROK in June 1949. To build sup- port for its approval, on January 12, 1950, Secretary of State Dean G. Ache- son’s speech to the National Press Club depicted an optimistic future for South Korea. Six months later, critics charged that his exclusion of the ROK from the US “defensive perimeter” gave the Communists a “green light” to launch an invasion. However, Soviet documents have established that Acheson’s words had almost no impact on Communist invasion planning. Moreover, by June 1950, the US policy of containment in Korea through economic means appeared to be experiencing marked success. The ROK had acted vigorously to control spiraling inflation, and Rhee’s opponents won legislative control in May elections. As important, the ROK army virtually eliminated guerrilla activities, threatening internal order in South Korea, causing the Truman administration to propose a sizeable military aid increase. Now optimistic about the ROK’s prospects for survival, Washington wanted to deter a conventional attack from the north.

Stalin worried about South Korea’s threat to North Korea’s survival. Throughout 1949, he consistently refused to approve Kim Il Sung’s persistent requests to authorize an attack on the ROK. Communist victory in China in fall 1949 pressured Stalin to show his support for a similar Korean outcome. In January 1950, he and Kim discussed plans for an invasion in Moscow, but the Soviet dictator was not ready to give final consent. How- ever, he did authorize a major expansion of the DPRK’s military capabilities. At an April meeting, Kim Il Sung persuaded Stalin that a military victory would be quick and easy because of southern guerilla support and an anticipated popular uprising against Rhee’s regime. Still fearing US military intervention, Stalin informed Kim that he could invade only if Mao Zedong approved. During May, Kim Il Sung went to Beijing to gain the consent of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Significantly, Mao also voiced concern that the Americans would defend the ROK but gave his reluctant approval as well. Kim Il Sung’s patrons had joined in approving his reckless decision for war.

On the morning of June 25, 1950, the Korean People’s Army (KPA) launched its military offensive to conquer South Korea. Rather than immediately committing ground troops, Truman’s first action was to approve referral of the matter to the UN Security Council because he hoped the ROK military could defend itself with primarily indirect US assistance. The UN Security Council’s first resolution called on North Korea to accept a cease- fire and withdraw, but the KPA continued its advance. On June 27, a second resolution requested that member nations provide support for the ROK’s defense. Two days later, Truman, still optimistic that a total commitment was avoidable, agreed in a press conference with a newsman’s description of the conflict as a “police action.” His actions reflected an existing policy that sought to block Communist expansion in Asia without using US military power, thereby avoiding increases in defense spending. But early on June 30, he reluctantly sent US ground troops to Korea after General Douglas MacArthur, US Occupation commander in Japan, advised that failure to do so meant certain Communist destruction of the ROK.

Kim Il Sung’s patrons [Stalin and Mao] had joined in approving his reckless decision for war.

On July 7, 1950, the UN Security Council created the United Nations Command (UNC) and called on Truman to appoint a UNC commander. The president immediately named MacArthur, who was required to submit periodic reports to the United Nations on war developments. The ad- ministration blocked formation of a UN committee that would have direct access to the UNC commander, instead adopting a procedure whereby MacArthur received instructions from and reported to the JCS. Fifteen members joined the US in defending the ROK, but 90 percent of forces were South Korean and American with the US providing weapons, equipment, and logistical support. Despite these American commitments, UNC forces initially suffered a string of defeats. By July 20, the KPA shattered five US battalions as it advanced one hundred miles south of Seoul, the ROK capital. Soon, UNC forces finally stopped the KPA at the Pusan Perimeter, a rectangular area in the southeast corner of the peninsula.

On September 11, 1950, Truman had approved NSC-81, a plan to cross the thirty-eighth parallel and forcibly reunify Korea

Despite the UNC’s desperate situation during July, MacArthur developed plans for a counteroffensive in coordination with an amphibious landing behind enemy lines allowing him to “compose and unite” Korea. State Department officials began to lobby for forcible reunification once the UNC assumed the offensive, arguing that the US should destroy the KPA and hold free elections for a government to rule a united Korea. The JCS had grave doubts about the wisdom of landing at the port of Inchon, twenty miles west of Seoul, because of narrow access, high tides, and sea- walls, but the September 15 operation was a spectacular success. It allowed the US Eighth Army to break out of the Pusan Perimeter and advance north to unite with the X Corps, liberating Seoul two weeks later and sending the KPA scurrying back into North Korea. A month earlier, the administration had abandoned its initial war aim of merely restoring the status quo. On September 11, 1950, Truman had approved NSC-81, a plan to cross the thirty-eighth parallel and forcibly reunify Korea.

Invading the DPRK was an incredible blunder that transformed a three-month war into one lasting three years. US leaders had realized that extension of hostilities risked Soviet or Chinese entry, and therefore, NSC- 81 included the precaution that only Korean units would move into the most northern provinces. On October 2, PRC Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai warned the Indian ambassador that China would intervene in Korea if US forces crossed the parallel, but US officials thought he was bluffing. The UNC offensive began on October 7, after UN passage of a resolution authorizing MacArthur to “ensure conditions of stability throughout Korea.” At a meeting at Wake Island on October 15, MacArthur assured Truman that China would not enter the war, but Mao already had decided to intervene after concluding that Beijing could not tolerate US challenges to its regional credibility. He also wanted to repay the DPRK for sending thou- sands of soldiers to fight in the Chinese civil war. On August 5, Mao instructed his northeastern military district commander to prepare for operations in Korea in the first ten days of September. China’s dictator then muted those associates opposing intervention.

On October 19, units of the Chinese People’s Volunteers (CPV) under the command of General Peng Dehuai crossed the Yalu River. Five days later, MacArthur ordered an offensive to China’s border with US forces in the vanguard. When the JCS questioned this violation of NSC-81, MacArthur replied that he had discussed this action with Truman on Wake Island. Having been wrong in doubting Inchon, the JCS remained silent this time. Nor did MacArthur’s superiors object when he chose to retain a divided command. Even after the first clash between UNC and CPV troops on October 26, the general remained supremely confident. One week later, the Chinese sharply attacked advancing UNC and ROK forces. In response, MacArthur ordered air strikes on Yalu bridges without seeking Washing- ton’s approval. Upon learning this, the JCS prohibited the assaults, pending Truman’s approval. MacArthur then asked that US pilots receive permission for “hot pursuit” of enemy aircraft fleeing into Manchuria. He was infuriated upon learning that the British were advancing a UN proposal to halt the UNC offensive well short of the Yalu to avert war with China, viewing the measure as appeasement.

On November 24, MacArthur launched his “Home-by-Christmas Offensive.” The next day, the CPV counterattacked en masse, sending UNC forces into a chaotic retreat southward and causing the Truman administration immediately to consider pursuing a Korean cease-fire. In several public pronouncements, MacArthur blamed setbacks not on himself but on unwise command limitations. In response, Truman approved a directive to US officials that State Department approval was required for any comments about the war. Later that month, MacArthur submitted a four- step “Plan for Victory” to defeat the Communists—a naval blockade of China’s coast, authorization to bombard military installations in Manchuria, deployment of Chiang Kai-shek Nationalist forces in Korea, and launching of an attack on mainland China from Taiwan. The JCS, despite later denials, considered implementing these actions before receiving favorable battlefield reports.

Early in 1951, Lieutenant General Matthew B. Ridgway, new commander of the US Eighth Army, halted the Communist southern advance. Soon, UNC counterattacks restored battle lines north of the thirty-eighth parallel. In March, MacArthur, frustrated by Washington’s refusal to escalate the war, issued a demand for immediate surrender to the Communists that sabotaged a planned cease-fire initiative. Truman reprimanded but did not recall the general. On April 5, House Republican Minority Leader Joseph W. Martin Jr. read MacArthur’s letter in Congress, once again criticizing the administration’s efforts to limit the war. Truman later argued that this was the “last straw.” On April 11, with the unanimous support of top advisors, the president fired MacArthur, justifying his action as a defense of the constitutional principle of civilian control over the military, but another consideration may have exerted even greater influence on Truman. The JCS had been monitoring a Communist military buildup in East Asia and thought a trusted UNC commander should have standing authority to retaliate against Soviet or Chinese escalation, including the use of nuclear weapons that they had deployed to forward Pacific bases. Truman and his advisors, as well as US allies, distrusted MacArthur, fearing that he might provoke an incident to widen the war.

MacArthur’s recall ignited a firestorm of public criticism against both Truman and the war. The general returned to tickertape parades and, on April 19, 1951, he delivered a televised address before a joint session of Congress, defending his actions and making this now-famous assertion: “In war there is no substitute for victory.” During Senate joint committee hearings on his firing in May, MacArthur denied that he was guilty of in- subordination. General Omar N. Bradley, the JCS chair, made the administration’s case, arguing that enacting MacArthur’s proposals would lead to “the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.” Meanwhile, in April, the Communists launched the first of two major offensives in a final effort to force the UNC off the peninsula. When May ended, the CPV and KPA had suffered huge losses, and a UNC counteroffensive then restored the front north of the parallel, persuading Beijing and Pyongyang, as was already the case in Washington, that pursuit of a cease-fire was necessary. The belligerents agreed to open truce negotiations on July 10 at Kaesong, a neutral site that the Communists deceitfully occupied on the eve of the first session.

North Korea and China created an acrimonious atmosphere with at- tempts at the outset to score propaganda points, but the UNC raised the first major roadblock with its proposal for a demilitarized zone extending deep into North Korea. More important, after the talks moved to Panmunjom in October, there was rapid progress in resolving almost all is- sues, including establishment of a demilitarized zone along the battle lines, truce enforcement inspection procedures, and a postwar political conference to discuss withdrawal of foreign troops and reunification. An armistice could have been concluded ten months after talks began had the negotiators not deadlocked over the disposition of prisoners of war (POWs). Rejecting the UNC proposal for non-forcible repatriation, the Communists demanded adherence to the Geneva Convention that required return of all POWs. Beijing and Pyongyang were guilty of hypocrisy regarding this matter because they were subjecting UNC prisoners to unspeakable mistreatment and indoctrination.

On April 11, with the unanimous support of top advisors, the presi- dent fired MacArthur.

Truman ordered that the UNC delegation assume an inflexible stand against returning Communist prisoners to China and North Korea against their will. “We will not buy an armistice,” he insisted, “by turning over human beings for slaughter or slavery.” Although Truman unquestionably believed in the moral rightness of his position, he was not unaware of the propaganda value derived from Communist prisoners defecting to the “free world.” His advisors, however, withheld evidence from him that contradicted this assessment. A vast majority of North Korean POWs were actually South Koreans who either joined voluntarily or were impressed into the KPA. Thousands of Chinese POWs were Nationalist soldiers trapped in China at the end of the civil war, who now had the chance to escape to Taiwan. Chinese Nationalist guards at UNC POW camps used terrorist “re-education” tactics to compel prisoners to refuse repatriation; resisters risked beatings or death, and repatriates were even tattooed with anti- Communist slogans.

In November 1952, angry Americans elected Dwight D. Eisenhower president, in large part because they expected him to end what had be- come the very unpopular “Mr. Truman’s War.” Fulfilling a campaign pledge, the former general visited Korea early in December, concluding that further ground attacks would be futile. Simultaneously, the UN General Assembly called for a neutral commission to resolve the dispute over POW repatriation. Instead of embracing the plan, Eisenhower, after taking office in January 1953, seriously considered threatening a nuclear attack on China to force a settlement. Signaling his new resolve, Eisenhower announced on February 2 that he was ordering removal of the US Seventh Fleet from the Taiwan Strait, implying endorsement for a Nationalist assault on the mainland. What influenced China more was the devastating impact of the war. By summer 1952, the PRC faced huge domestic economic problems and likely decided to make peace once Truman left office. Major food shortages and physical devastation persuaded Pyongyang to favor an armistice even earlier.

An armistice ended fighting in Korea on July 27, 1953.

Early in 1953, China and North Korea were prepared to resume the truce negotiations, but the Communists preferred that the Americans make the first move. That came on February 22 when the UNC, repeating a Red Cross proposal, suggested exchanging sick and wounded prisoners. At this key moment, Stalin died on March 5. Rather than dissuading the PRC and the DPRK as Stalin had done, his successors encouraged them to act on their desire for peace. On March 28, the Communist side accepted the UNC proposal. Two days later, Zhou Enlai publicly proposed transfer of prisoners rejecting repatriation to a neutral state. On April 20, Operation Little Switch, the exchange of sick and wounded prisoners, began, and six days later, negotiations resumed at Panmunjom. Sharp disagreement followed over the final details of the truce agreement. Eisenhower insisted later that the PRC accepted US terms after Secretary of State John Foster Dulles informed India’s prime minister in May that without progress toward a truce, the US would terminate the existing limitations on its conduct of the war. No documentary evidence has of yet surfaced to support his assertion.

Also, by early 1953, both Washington and Beijing clearly wanted an armistice, having tired of the economic burdens, military losses, political and military constraints, worries about an expanded war, and pressure from allies and the world community to end the stalemated conflict. A steady stream of wartime issues threatened to inflict irrevocable damage on US relations with its allies in Western Europe and nonaligned members of the United Nations. Indeed, in May 1953, US bombing of North Korea’s dams and irrigation system ignited an outburst of world criticism. Later that month and early in June, the CPV staged powerful attacks against ROK defensive positions. Far from being intimidated, Beijing thus displayed its continuing resolve, using military means to persuade its adversary to make concessions on the final terms. Before the belligerents could sign the agreement, Rhee tried to torpedo the impending truce when he released 27,000 North Korean POWs. Eisenhower bought Rhee’s acceptance of a cease-fire with pledges of financial aid and a mutual security pact.

An armistice ended fighting in Korea on July 27, 1953. Since then, Koreans have seen the war as the second-greatest tragedy in their recent history after Japanese colonial rule. Not only did it cause devastation and three million deaths, it also confirmed the division of a homogeneous society after thirteen centuries of unity, while permanently separating millions of families. Meanwhile, US wartime spending jump-started Japan’s economy, which led to its emergence as a global power. Koreans instead had to endure the living tragedy of yearning for reunification, as diplomatic tension and military clashes along the demilitarized zone continued into the twenty-first century.

Korea’s war also dramatically reshaped world affairs. In response, US leaders vastly increased defense spending, strengthened the North Atlantic Treaty Organization militarily, and pressed for rearming West Germany. In Asia, the conflict saved Chiang’s regime on Taiwan, while making South Korea a long-term client of the US. US relations with China were poisoned for twenty years, especially after Washington persuaded the United Nations to condemn the PRC for aggression in Korea. Ironically, the war helped Mao’s regime consolidate its control in China, while elevating its regional prestige. In response, US leaders, acting on what they saw as Korea’s primary lesson, relied on military means to meet the challenge, with disastrous results in Việt Nam.

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SUGGESTED RESOURCES

Kaufman, Burton I. The Korean Conflict . Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999.

“Korea: Lessons of the Forgotten War.” YouTube video, 2:20, posted by KRT Productions Inc., 2000. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi31OoQfD7U.

Lee, Steven Hugh. The Korean War. New York: Longman, 2001.

Matray, James I. “Korea’s War at Sixty: A Survey of the Literature.” Cold War History 11, no. 1 (February 2011): 99–129.

US Department of Defense. Korea 1950–1953, accessed July 9, 2012, http://koreanwar.defense.gov/index.html.

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North Korea responds to a long-standing South Korean provocation.

North Korea has been flying substantial numbers of “trash balloons” over to South Korea. Cell phones sound alerts in the middle of the night whenever these balloons cross over into South Korea. The balloons, which often contain animal waste, have caused quite extensive damage, such as breaking vinyl greenhouses and hitting private cars.

Although confrontations between North and South Korea are usually triggered by North Korea, on this occasion the issue began with the South Koreans.

For many years, South Korean civil groups have been tying USBs containing leaflets criticizing the Kim Jong Un administration, along with South Korean movies, TV series, and K-pop to balloons that are then dispatched northward. The practice has been an irritation for Pyongyang. Leaflets denigrating the Supreme Leader are not only considered outrageous in North Korea, but the North Koreans are also nervous about the influx of South Korean culture, as evidenced in the enactment of the “Law on Rejecting Reactionary Ideology and Culture” in December 2020 and the “Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Act” in January 2023.

Their patience having run thin, the North Koreans issued a statement in the name of the vice defense minister on May 25, threatening to fly balloons to South Korea. The statement expressed strong concern about “how much effort is required to remove them,” meaning the flying objects from the south, and said that the flying balloons were “a dangerous provocation that can be utilized for a specific military purpose.” With this, Pyongyang is suggesting that balloons can be used as biochemical weapons; as such, its anger is understandable.

Nonetheless, South Korea did not end the practice, and three days later, North Korea began sending balloons toward South Korea, carrying cigarette butts, old batteries, and even excrement. Obviously, Pyongyang concluded that flying leaflets praising Kim Jong Un would have little effect on the South Korean people.

On May 29, Kim Yo Jong, vice department director of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK), jokingly referred to the “trash balloons” as “sincere presents” and criticized South Korea for holding that the leaflet distribution falls under “freedom of expression.” On June 2, the vice defense minister issued another statement unilaterally declaring that this action would be “temporarily halted,” but warned that if the South Korean side resumed distributing leaflets, they would “again dump 100 times more trash.”

The Yoon Suk-yeol administration did not urge South Koreans to exercise restraint, and after a group of North Korean defectors dispatched leaflets toward North Korea on the 6th, the North Koreans began to fly “trash balloons” again on the 8th, although the volume was some way short of “100 times more.” Clearly, it takes some time to prepare such a large number of big balloons.

On the 9th, Kim Yo Jong released another statement, the last sentence revealing her true sentiment. Rather than threatening specific acts of retaliation, it concluded by saying, “I sternly warn Seoul to stop at once this dangerous act that may create a new environment of crisis.” It is quite clear that North Korea only wants to stop the balloons from South Korea, hoping to avoid escalating the issue more than necessary. As further evidence of this, the Rodong Sinmun has not reported on this move to the domestic readership.

North Korea also condemned the balloons from South Korea in June 2020. Back then, it used the practice as an excuse to blow up the Inter-Korean Liaison Office, a symbol of inter-Korean cooperation, and informed the North Korean people in detail about the deterioration of relations with South Korea.

In December 2020, South Korea – then under the Moon Jae-in administration, whose goal was peaceful coexistence with North Korea – enacted the “Law Prohibiting the Sending of Leaflets to North Korea,” which imposed a penalty of up to three years in prison for distributing leaflets. However, in May 2022, to the hardline conservative Yoon Suk-yeol administration took over, and in September 2023, the Constitutional Court ruled the law unconstitutional as it “excessively restricts freedom of expression.”

Retaliating against the “trash balloons,” the South Korean government decided to suspend the Comprehensive Military Agreement (CMA), which had been signed in September 2018, on June 4. Likely the intention was to send a strong message to North Korea, but in reality, this was a significant loss for South Korea as well. Under the agreement, North Korea had made concessions to South Korea, such as acknowledging the existence of the Northern Limit Line (NLL) for the first time. It is not a good idea for South Korea to let go of this framework in an attempt to regulate North Korea’s actions. President Yoon Suk-yeol voluntarily gave up this card just so that he could reject his predecessor’s policy toward North Korea.

Under the assumption that the balloons carry not leaflets or excrement but biochemical weapons, both South and North Korea are on high alert. Unlike ballistic missiles, balloons can be flown at low altitudes in large numbers simultaneously, so there are natural limits to the available countermeasures. With this issue unlikely to end any time soon, it will surely not be long before “trash balloons” that fall into the sea wash up on the coasts of Korean neighbors such as Japan.

ISOZAKI Atsuhito is a professor at Keio University.

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The Korean War: Barbarism Unleashed

    Contents

“Massacre in Korea” by Pablo Picasso, 1951

I. Introduction: Contrasting views

Remembering the korean war, was the korean war necessary and just, could the war have been avoided, ii. origins and causes of the korean war, backdrop of japanese colonialism, american imperial ambitions, social revolution and repression in north korea.

• Brutal anticommunist pacification in South Korea
• Southern provocations and the origins of the war

Domestic politics and bipartisan support for the war

Iii. military history of the war, north korean blitzkrieg and occupation of seoul.

• “So terrible a liberation:” Pusan, Seoul, Inchon, and Operation Rat Killer

Chinese counterattack and American retreat

High noon: the truman-macarthur stand-off.

• Bombing ‘em back to the Stone Age: Aerial techno-war over North Korea

IV. Public opinion and antiwar dissent in the United States

• Manufacturing consent: Media coverage of the war

The responsibility of intellectuals: “Crackpot Realists” and the New Mandarins

Grassroots antiwar activism and dissent, american soldiers’ experience and disillusionment.

• Letter exchange between a questioning Marine, his father, and Dean Acheson

V. The war’s costs, dirty secrets, and legacies

South korea’s truth and reconciliation commission and atrocities in the war.

• Dirty little secrets: Maltreatment of prisoners of war

Allegations of biological warfare

• “The Horror, The Horror”: Korea’s Lieutenant Kurtz

Racism and class stratification in the U.S. Army

• Canada and Great Britain’s Korean War

Legacies of the war

Recommended resources, about the author, did you know.

• Japan imposed colonial rule over Korea from 1910 to 1945.
• With Japan on the verge of defeat in World War II, two young American army officers drew an arbitrary line across Korea at the 38th parallel, creating an American zone in the south and a Soviet zone in the north.  Both South and North Korea became repressive regimes.
• In South Korea, the United States built up a police force and constabulary and backed the authoritarian leader Syngman Rhee, who created a police state.  By 1948 partisan warfare had enveloped the whole of South Korea, which in turn became enmeshed in civil war between South and North Korea.
• In North Korea, the government of Kim II-Sung arrested and imprisoned student and church leaders, and gunned down protesters on November 23, 1945.  Christians as well as business and land owners faced with the confiscation of their property began fleeing to the South.
• The U.S. Army counter-intelligence corps organized paramilitary commandos to carry out sabotage missions in the North, a factor accounting for the origins of the war.  The Korean War officially began on June 25, 1950, when North Korea conducted a massive invasion of the South.
• The U.S. obtained the approval of the United Nations for the defense of South Korea (the Soviet Union had boycotted the UN over the issue of seating China).  Sixteen nations supplied troops although the vast majority came from the United States and South Korea.  U.S. General Douglas MacArthur headed the United Nations Command.
• The three-year Korean War resulted in the deaths of three to four million Koreans, produced 6-7 million refugees, and destroyed over 8,500 factories, 5,000 schools, 1,000 hospitals and 600,000 homes.  Over 36,000 American soldiers died in the war.
• From air bases in Okinawa and naval aircraft carriers, the U.S. Air Force launched over 698,000 tons of bombs (compared to 500,000 tons in the entire Pacific theater in World War II), obliterating 18 of 22 major cities and destroying much of the infrastructure in North Korea.
• The US bombed irrigation dams, destroying 75 percent of the North’s rice supply, violating civilian protections set forth in the Geneva Conventions of 1949.
• The Korean War has been called a “limited war” because the U.S. refrained from using nuclear weapons (although this was considered).  Yet the massive destruction of North Korea and the enormous death toll in both North and South mark it as one of the most barbarous wars in modern history.
• Reports of North Korean atrocities and war crimes were well publicized in the United States at the time.  The 2005 South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission, however, judged that most of the mass killings of civilians were conducted by South Korean military and police forces, with the United States adding more from the air.
• For all the human suffering caused by the Korean War, very little was solved.  The war ended in stalemate with the division of the country at the 38th parallel.

Korean War Memorial in Washington

The Washington war memorial stands in sharp contrast to one of the finest pieces of art to emerge from the war, Pablo Picasso’s painting “Massacre in Korea” (1951).  Picasso captured much about the horrors of American style techno-war in depicting a group of robot-like soldiers descending on a village – thought to be Sinchon in South Hwangae Province, North Korea.  The soldiers are preparing to execute women and children suspected of sheltering guerrilla combatants.  The miracle of the painting is that the faces of the women about to be shot are transformed into masks of art, an expression of life amidst the horror and death that is war.

Korean War Monument in Seoul

The ceremony epitomizes Korea’s status as a “forgotten war” in American memory, one which came between the glorious victory in World War II and inglorious defeat in Vietnam.  Writing in the Washington Post , Richard L. Halferty, head of the Texas Korean War Veterans Committee compared the Memorial Day slight with the heroic reception he claimed to have received on a visit to Seoul and Chipyong-ni in 2010, where he was allegedly hugged and thanked by women and men who spotted his Korean War veterans hat.  In considering the question, was the war worth it, Halferty urged readers to look at the results.  “When the U.S. entered the war to protect the freedom of South Korea, the nation was at the bottom of the world.  The Korean people took the freedom we helped buy with our blood and rose to become one of the top economies in the world.” [3]

Korean War Memorial in Pyongyang

Wolfowitz’ analysis is undercut by George Katsiaficas’ history, Asia’s Unknown Uprisings: South Korean Social Movements in the 20 th Century (2012), which shows that democracy emerged in 1987 not because it was promoted by the U.S. but because of the efforts of committed social activists, many of whom endured torture, beatings, and massacres fighting against the American-imposed military dictatorship.  For years, the U.S. had built up South Korea’s military and police forces, honoring the generals who committed myriad atrocities, including the 1980 Kwangju massacre, South Korea’s equivalent to the Tiananmen Square massacre in China in 1989. [6]

On June 27, 1950, President Truman sent U.S. forces to Korea under United Nations authority, without a declaration of war from Congress

President Harry S. Truman claimed the U.S. goal in Korea was to prevent the “rule of force in international affairs” and to “uphold the rule of law,” but this was utterly contradicted by American support for right-wing counter-insurgent forces in Greece, which committed large-scale atrocities in suppressing an indigenous left-wing rebellion led by anti-fascist elements, and in subsequent years, by Washington’s overthrow by force of the legally elected governments of Iran and Guatemala in 1953 and 1954, respectively.  As Howard Zinn pointed out in Postwar America, 1945-1971 (1973), other cases of aggression or alleged aggression in the world, such as the Arab states invasion of Israel in 1948, did not prompt the U.S. to mobilize the UN or its own armed forces for intervention.  Zinn concluded that the decision to intervene in Korea was, at its core, political, designed to uphold the dictatorial U.S. client regime of Syngman Ree and acquire U.S. military bases in South Korea, which the U.S. did as a result of the war. [10]

Survivors wander among the debris in the aftermath of an air raid by U.S. planes over Pyongyang, circa 1950 (photo: Keystone/Getty Images)

Donald Kingsley, head of the UN Korean Relief and Reconstruction Agency, called Korea “the most devastated land and its people the most destitute in the history of modern warfare.” [12]   This devastation was inflicted primarily by the United States and its proxies with backing from the United Nations.  Taking this into account, the Korean War can be considered to have been a gross injustice and crime for which the U.S. bears important responsibility.  To add insult to injury, the war did not resolve the conflict between North and South, which lingers on today, over 60 years later.

Yo Unhyong, South Korean leader who sought peaceful unification

Among Rhee’s victims were moderate nationalist politicians such as Kim Ku, who warned that Koreans should not fight each other, and Yo Un-Hyong, who had wanted the peaceful unification of North and South.  Yo had headed a provisional government preceding the U.S. military occupation and advocated a mix of liberal-nationalist and social democratic ideals which were anathema to the Rhee government.  Revered in both North and South Korea today,  Yo had been a newspaper editor who opposed Japanese colonialism, and though not a communist himself, had always been willing to work with communists.  Had the U.S. supported Yo and his efforts to create a unity government with the North, the war and its attendant misery could likely have been avoided and Korea’s history would be much different.  Instead, Congress passed the Far Eastern Economic Assistance Act in February 1950, which required immediate termination of U.S. aid to South Korea should a single member of communist-linked parties in the South join the coalition government, or if any member of the North Korean government participated in the South Korean government, which could presage an end to the artificial division of the 2,000-year-old Korean culture. [13]

Japan and the U.S. both entered the imperial competition in Asia at the turn of the 20th century, Japan in Korea and the U.S. in the Philippines. Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Russia had already established control over large areas of Asia.

Beyond occupying South Korea at the end of World War II, U.S. involvement in Korea was a consequence of the long American drive for power in the Asia-Pacific region dating to the seizure of Hawaii and conquest of the Philippines at the turn of the 20 th century.  This mission was motivated by a trinity of military, missionary, and business interests.  After the defeat of Japan in World War II, the prospect opened up that the region could come under U.S. influence, its rich resources tapped for the benefit of American industry.  In a March 1955 Foreign Affairs article, William Henderson of the Council on American Foreign Relations (which Laurence Shoup and William Minter aptly termed the “imperial brain trust”) wrote: “As one of the earth’s great storehouses of natural resources, Southeast Asia is a prize worth fighting for.  Five sixths of the world’s rubber, and one half of its tin are produced here.  It accounts for two thirds of the world output in coconut, one third of the palm oil, and significant proportions of tungsten and chromium.  No less important than the natural wealth was Southeast Asia’s key strategic position astride the main lines of communication between Europe and the Far East.” [20]   To secure access to these resources, the U.S. established a chain of military bases from the Philippines through the Ryukyu Archipelago in southern Japan.

Many Koreans yearned for a major social transformation following the era of Japanese colonial rule and, like other people in decolonizing nations, looked to socialist bloc countries as a model. Americans, unfortunately, were conditioned to view the world in Manichean Cold War terms and thus never developed a proper understanding for the appeal of revolutionaries such as Kim Il Sung.  North Korea experienced a genuine social revolution in the years 1945-1950, which was driven from the top down as well as the bottom up.  The liberating aspects of this social revolution, however, were compromised by the establishment of a repressive police state as well as a personality cult around Kim II-Sung, much like those surrounding Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.  Still, North Korea was not the puppet of the Soviet Union or China that Americans imagined.

Kim II-Sung (center) and Mao Tse Tung in Beijing, 1954

As the Soviet Union occupied North Korea Kim Il-Sung consolidated his position as the “great leader” of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).  Kim Il Sung joined the Communist Party of Korea in 1931 and, as previously noted, earned a measure of fame for spearheading nationalist resistance to Japanese rule in Manchuria during the 1930s.  After being pursued by the Japanese in Manchuria, Kim Il Sung escaped to the Soviet Union and became an officer in the Red Army during World War II.  He returned to Korea in September 1945 and, with Soviet backing, established himself as the North Korean leader.  He gained Mao Zedong’s support by recruiting a cadre of guerrillas to aid communist forces in the Chinese civil war.

Kim II-Sung and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin

The Soviet Union’s main interest in Korea was in seeking access to warm water ports and a friendly regime as a buffer against Japan.  Soviet soldiers, like most occupying armies, abused the local population, in some instances committing rapes. Their presence, however, was confined predominantly to the capital, Pyongyang.  Soviet advisers helped draft a new constitution, sponsored cultural exchanges and programs, and guided certain reforms and foreign policy.  North Koreans nonetheless asserted considerable autonomy and many looked to Russia and China as countries which were rapidly industrializing and had empowered the peasantry and masses by moving to abolish class distinctions.

The North Korean government also relied on authoritarian measures and repression of dissent, confirming the West’s negative view of it in this regard.  The Kim II-Sung regime developed a siege mentality that demanded unity in the face of the threat of outside subversion. [29]   The DPRK created a draconian surveillance apparatus, purging political rivals to Kim and his clique.  On November 23, 1945, in Sinuiji, security forces gunned down Christian student protesters in front of the North P’yongan provincial office; and later some three hundred students and twenty Christian pastors were arrested after further anticommunist demonstrations.  American intelligence concluded that the “nucleus of resistance of the Communist regime are the church groups, long prominent in North Korea, and secret student societies.  Resistance was centered in the cities, notably Pyongyang, and took the form of school strikes, circulation of leaflets, demonstrations and assassinations.  The government replied with arrests and imprisonments, investigations of student and church groups, and destruction of churches.” [30]   Christians as well as business and land owners faced with the confiscation of their property began fleeing to the South.  With deep grievances against communism, these refugees provided a backbone of support for the Syngman Rhee government.  Many served in right-wing youth groups, modeled after fascist style organizations, which violently broke up workers demonstrations and assaulted left-wing political activists. [31]

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (north) was established Sept. 9, 1948

In June 1949, North Korea accelerated its “peace offensive” toward the South, calling for all “democratic” – that is anti-Syngman Rhee forces – to join with the North in unifying the Korean peninsula and removing the Americans.  It pushed for free elections in which left wing political parties in the South were legalized and political prisoners released.  According to the historian Charles K. Armstrong, in The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 , a free political environment would have given the left an estimated 80 percent of the vote in the North and 65-70 percent of the votes in the South.  Kim and his allies could thus come to power through democratic means had the popular uprising in the South not been repressed. [32]

Brutal anti-communist pacification in South Korea

Syngman Rhee headed South Korea from its beginning in 1948 to his overthrow in 1960

In practice, Rhee exhibited strong autocratic tendencies and relied heavily on Japanese collaborators – in part because he had been out of the country so long.  He was elected president in July 1948 by members of the National Assembly, who themselves had been elected on May 10 in a national election marred by boycotts, violence and a climate of terrorism.  The elections were originally intended to be held in both the North and South, but Kim II-Sung refused to allow UN supervisors entry into North Korea.  Some South Koreans boycotted the elections on the grounds that they would solidify the division between the Koreas, which is indeed what happened.  Syngman Rhee proceeded to consolidate his rule thereafter.  When asked by the journalist Mark Gayn whether Rhee was a fascist, Lieutenant Leonard Bertsch, an adviser to General John R. Hodge, head of the American occupation, responded, “He is two centuries before fascism—a true Bourbon.” [35]

The Republic of Korea (south) was established on August 15, 1948

Political opposition to Rhee’s government emerged almost immediately when Rhee, with U.S. backing, retained Japanese-trained military leaders and police officers instead of removing them.  Those who had resisted Japanese rule, administered with the aid of these collaborators, called for Rhee’s ouster.  The communists in South Korea protested the loudest, as they had led the anti-Japanese insurrection, but opposition to Rhee was widespread.  Resistance to the U.S. occupation and Rhee’s government was led by labor and farmers’ associations and People’s Committees, which organized democratic governance and social reform at the local level.  The mass-based South Korean Labor Party (SKLP), headed by Pak Hon-Yong, a veteran of anti-Japanese protest with communist ties, led strikes and carried out acts of industrial sabotage. [37]   Rhee responded by building up police and security forces and, with assistance from the American Military Government (AMG), attempting to eliminate all political opposition, which he labeled communist-backed.  Thus, the earlier antagonism between rebels and collaborators during Japanese rule took on the dimensions of both a partisan struggle within South Korea and a struggle between North and South.

Suspected South Korean traitors fill the back of a truck, on their way to execution by South Korean security forces – Taeju, South Korea, 1950

By mid-1947, there were almost 22,000 people in jail, nearly twice as many as under the Japanese, with the Red Cross pointing to inadequate medical care and sanitation.  Professors and assemblymen were among those tortured in custody.  Those branded as communists were dehumanized to the extent that they were seen as unworthy of legal protection.  Pak Wan-so, a South Korean writer who faced imprisonment and torture by police commented that “they called me a red bitch. Any red was not considered human…. They looked at me as if I was a beast or a bug…. Because we weren’t human, we had no rights.” [39]   The scale of repression in South Korea at this time far surpassed that of North Korea.  In Mokpo seaport, the bodies of prisoners who had been shot were left on people’s doorsteps as a warning in what became known as the “human flesh distribution case.” [40]   A government official defended the practice saying they were the most “vile of communists.”

On April 14, 1950, ten miles northeast of Seoul, South Korean Military Police executed 39 Koreans suspected of being “communist”

In light of these events, the claim of John Foster Dulles, writing in the New York Times Magazine, that the ROKA and police had the “highest discipline” and that South Korea was essentially a “healthy society” does not stand up to historical scrutiny. [47]   Another popular myth held that the U.S. abandoned South Korea in the late 1940s.  American military advisers in reality were all over the country through this period, training Korean soldiers and police, leading counter-insurgency missions.  The latter included the forced displacement of villagers that became a basis for the Strategic Hamlet program in South Vietnam.  The U.S. provided spotter planes and naval vessels to secure the coasts, even enlisting missionaries to provide information on anti-Rhee guerrillas.  ROKA soldiers were “armed to the toenails” with American weapons.  They adopted “scorched earth” tactics modeled after Japanese counter-insurgency operations in Manchuria.

Southern provocations and the origins of the Korean War

Secretary of State Dean Acheson

Acheson, one of the war’s main architects, was himself an Anglophile with a lifelong admiration of the British Empire.  Radical journalist I. F. Stone commented that he represented not the “free American spirit” but something “old, wrinkled, crafty and cruel, which stinks from centuries of corruption.”  Showing little empathy or consideration for the Korean people, Acheson said Korea was “not a local situation” but the “spear-point of a drive made by the whole communist control group on the entire power position of the West.”  Inaction in the face of invasion, he believed, would damage U.S. credibility, and the international system involving international treaties, the Marshall Plan and NATO, and would cause communists to seize Formosa, Indochina, and finally Japan as well as give strength to domestic isolationists whom he loathed. [56]

President Truman established the principle of U.S. intervention against “communist aggression” in March 1947 (Truman Doctrine); the U.S. sent aid and military advisers to anti-communist factions in Greece and China

To sell the war to the public, Truman evoked fears of global communist domination and relied on UN Security Council support to legitimate the U.S.-led “police action” in Korea.  The “scare” campaign proved highly effective as 81 percent of Americans initially backed the intervention, according to a Gallup poll taken during the first week of the war. [58]    Time Magazine acknowledged that “it was a rare U.S. citizen that could pass a detailed quiz on the little piece of Asiatic peninsula he had just guaranteed with troops, planes and ships.”  For most Americans, the threat came from the Soviet Union rather than from North Korea.  The magazine quoted Evar Malin, 37, of Sycamore, Illinois: “I’ll tell ya, I think we done the right thing.  We had to take some kind of action against the Russians.” [59]   The magazine’s editors similarly identified the Russians as the real enemy.  “Russia’s latest aggression had united the U.S. — and the U.N. — as nothing else could,” they wrote.  “By decision of the U.S. and the U.N., the free world would now try to strike back, deal with the limited crises through which Communism was advancing.”

Anti-communist propaganda was directed at both external and internal “threats”

The Red Scare was at its height in the early 1950s.  According to a Gallup poll taken July 30-August 4, 1950, forty percent of Americans advocated placing domestic communists in concentration camps. [60]   Historian Mary S. McAuliffe wrote that the fears and frustrations of the Korean War provided a “psychological climate in which the domestic red scare already well rooted began to flourish.”  Truman had personally denounced Joseph McCarthy’s tactics but his hard-line foreign policy rhetoric and initiation of a domestic loyalty program raised the level of public anxiety about communism and buttressed the right-wing crusade. [61]  Attacking Truman for the “loss of China” following the 1949 Maoist revolution, McCarthy and Congressional Republicans staunchly supported the Korean War, believing in the need for a “seawall of blood and flesh and steel to hold back the communist hordes.” [62]   Disdainful of the decision to withdraw U.S. forces in 1949, the GOP went after “Red” Dean Acheson for alleged communist appeasement.  Dwight Eisenhower wrote in his memoir, Mandate for Change , that Acheson’s speech had “encouraged the communists to attack South Korea.”

Vito Marcantonio

Vito Marcantonio of the American Labor Party was the sole member of Congress to disavow U.S. intervention in Korea on the grounds of Korea’s right to self-determination.  Calling the Rhee government corrupt and fascistic, he told war supporters that “you can keep on making impassioned pleas for the destruction of communism but I tell you, the issue in China, in Asia, in Korea, and in Vietnam, is the right of these people for self-determination, to a government of their own, to independence and national unity.”  Earning the ire of the China lobby, Marcantonio lost his seat in the fall election of 1950. [74]

General Douglas MacArthur and Syngman Rhee

General Fred C. Weyand, who later became a top assistant to Vietnam Commander William C. Westmoreland, noted that the “American way of war is particularly violent, deadly and dreadful.  We believe in using ‘things’ – artillery, bombs, massive firepower – in order to conserve our soldiers’ lives.” [78]   This strategy of enemy annihilation through superior firepower is rooted in the racial dehumanization of American enemies and a society that sees all progress through the lens of technological advance, in which a cult of technical rationality has corroded human solidarity and empathy.  Together with the Vietnam War, the Korean War exemplifies the horrors bred by U.S. style techno-war and its limitations in confronting enemies in distant locales whose motivations the Americans barely understood.

Some 1,800 South Korean political prisoners were executed by the South Korean military at Taejon, South Korea, in July 1950 (AP Photo/National Archives, once classified as “top secret”)

During their occupation of South Korea, North Korean forces linked up with local leftists in reactivating people’s committees driven underground by Rhee.  Schooled in Maoist principles, the KPA promoted agrarian reform and other principles of the revolution, attempting to win “hearts and minds,” especially among the working class, students, and women.  Many in Seoul reportedly shouted and waved red flags when the northern soldiers arrived.  An Air Force survey found that a majority of factory workers, students and women supported the KPA and that strict control over the media and political education helped keep the rest of the public in-line. [85]

Some 400 Korean civilians in Taejon were killed by retreating communist forces in late Sept. 1950. Looking on at left is Gordon Gammack, war correspondent of the Des Moines Register and Tribune. (AP Photo/James Pringle)

American morale went through a drastic shift in the first weeks of war.  Prior to the fighting, Brigadier General George Barth of the 24 th Infantry thought his troops displayed an “unfounded overconfidence bordering on arrogance,” an attitude replicated by headquarters, which had ordered officers to pack their summer uniforms in anticipation of a victory parade through Seoul.  With their tanks ill-suited for Korea’s mountainous terrain and radios malfunctioning, hundreds of young soldiers were cut to pieces on hillsides and riverbanks and in rice paddies during the retreat south.  Over four hundred were killed or taken prisoner in Chinju on July 26th. [87]   Despite America’s enormous firepower, military historians have suggested that cuts to the basic training regimen combined with a high turnover in personnel and stagnant army doctrine based on World War II practices resulted in a lack of preparedness and poor combat results. [88]

Cooperation between U.S. and South Korean soldiers also proved difficult.  American soldiers often distrusted their South Korean counterparts, considering them to be infiltrated by communist “gooks.”  A South Korean military officer interviewed for an army study pointed to a lack of patience and empathy by American military advisers, and “ignorance of each-others’ minds and liability to misunderstanding on account of differences in custom.” [89]   E. J. Kahn reported in The New Yorker that American soldiers felt that “North Korean soldiers, all things considered, fought more skillfully and aggressively than South Korean soldiers…. because they had been more thoroughly instilled with the will to fight.”

“So terrible a liberation:” Pusan, Inchon, Seoul, and Operation Rat Killer

Inchon landing

In mid-September Gen. MacArthur engineered an amphibious landing behind enemy lines at Inchon.  The 230-ship invasion force was backed by helicopter spotters and ten Corsair and three Sky-raider air squadrons that carried out nearly 3,000 bombing sorties in a great display of combined air-sea power.  Over 13,000 Marines took advantage of a 31-foot tide and climbed over high seawalls before fighting off North Korean defenders, sustaining 3,500 casualties compared to over 20,000 North Koreans. “Operation Chromite,” as it was called, was enabled by the seizure of Wolmi-do Island, after it was showered with rockets, bombs and napalm, and by a joint CIA-military operation on Yonghung-do, a small island ten miles from Inchon, where Navy Lt. Eugene Clark obtained vital information for the assault.  When the KPA returned to Yonghung-do a few days later for a brief period, KPA soldiers allegedly shot more than 50 villagers, including “men and women, boys and girls, to demonstrate what happens to those who aid the Americans,” according to Col. Robert Heinl, Jr. [93]

Business district of Seoul, Sept. 28, 1950 (AP Photo/Max Desfor)

American weaponry proved more lethal.  Following their victory at Inchon, the 1 st Marines commanded by the famously aggressive “Chesty” Puller marched on Yongdongpo, an industrial suburb of Seoul, and turned it into a “sea of fire,” according to U.S. intelligence, with as many as 2,000 killed.  An AP reporter flying overhead described Yongdongpo as looking “like Nagasaki after the atomic bomb, it has been here 4,000 years and no long exists as a city.” [94]   Puller’s men then retook Seoul on September 27 in brutal house-to-house fighting, breaking through enemy barricades of felled trees.

In a testament to the destruction bred by American weapons technology, a private described the newly “liberated” Seoul as being filled with “great gaping skeletons of blackened buildings with their windows blown out…telephone wires hanging down loosely from their poles; glass and bricks everywhere, literally a town shot to hell.” Reginald Thompson noted that few people in history “could have suffered so terrible a liberation.” [95]

Liberated Taejon, South Korea, Sept. 30, 1950 (AP photo/Jim Pringle)

By September 30, all of South Korea was under the control of ROKA, U.S., and UN forces.  American and South Korean counterinsurgency teams then began operations to snuff out partisan guerrillas across South Korea.  Under “Operation Houseburner” U.S. units sprayed flame-throwers and threw incendiary grenades from helicopters on the roofs of village huts in order to deprive communists of support.  When the structure of some homes remained allowing guerrillas to hide in the cellars, napalm mixture was added to ensure the mud walls came crumbling down. [96]

MacArthur heads to the Yalu River

The U.S. hoped to incite an anticommunist rebellion in North Korea but this proved untenable, as much of the population detested the Rhee regime and some were genuinely grateful to the Kim II-Sung regime for land allotted to them under the North Korean land reform program.  The CIA had cautioned the White House against invading North Korea because of the “risk of a general war,” and the unpopularity of the Rhee regime among “many if not a majority of non-communist Koreans.” [103]   The advice was ignored, however.

Painting of American brutality at the Sinchon Museum of American War Atrocities

At Sinchon, North Korea, thousands of civilians were hunted in caves, burned alive or shot by ROKA and police equipped with flamethrowers and incendiaries under the command of Kim San Ju (whom Rhee later executed for insubordination).  At least 15,000 civilians were also killed in Pyongyang which was made to resemble “an empty citadel where death is king,” according to the New York Times .  “It seems no longer to be a city at all. It is more like a blackened community of the dead, a charred ghost town from which all the living have fled before a sudden plague.” [107]

The Chinese infantrymen were effective in camouflaging themselves by crawling along stream beds, ravines, and thick trees.  Adopting a tactic known as niupitang , in which infantry used stealth and tunneling to approach a platoon, they ambushed U.S.-UN forces after feigning withdrawal. Commanding Chinese General Peng Dehuai believed that the Americans were over-dependent on firepower, afraid of heavy casualties, and lacked the depth of reserves the Chinese could amass. [110]   The Americans were also unable to march like the North Koreans and Chinese, who had better knowledge of the terrain and could cover 30 miles of mountain in a winter night, subsisting on a diet of cold boiled rice. [111]   Playing on these weaknesses, the Chinese forced MacArthur’s retreat at the Changjin (Chosin) Reservoir plateau in what one Marine called “the most violent small unit fighting in American history.”  Some 40,000 Chinese soldiers died as compared to 561 Marines. [112]

U.S. Marines in North Korea, Dec. 1950

Many of the American soldiers suffered from frostbite owing to the lack of proper equipment.  A Filipino commander, Mariano Azurin, was removed for exposing the discrimination of Filipinos soldiers who were left to freeze when the American troops got all the warm clothes. [113]   One veteran said he could never figure out why a soldier of the richest country on earth had “to steal boots from soldiers’ of the poorest country on earth.”  In the unusually cold winter, vehicles once stopped would hardly run again, guns froze solid, and many automatic weapons would fire but one shot at a time.  Terrified of fighting the Chinese, many ROK units broke ranks and disappeared.  In a desperate attempt to break enemy morale and create hardship for the population, the U.S. army chemical corps initiated a program that used incendiary bombs filled with napalm to destroy North Korean cereal crops ready for harvesting. [114]

In a subsequent attack on the Naktong River “Battle of the Bulge” troops with the U.S. 34th Infantry drove the enemy from their foxholes with white phosphorus (known as “willie peter”) and then cut them to pieces with high explosives, killing six hundred North Koreans with zero casualties taken.  First Lieutenant Hubert D. Deatherage, with the Heavy Mortar Company 5th Infantry reported taking a hill at Kunchon at 200 hours on September 24, 1950 after firing 6,000 rounds mixing Willie Peter and high explosives.  The firepower knocked out two enemy tanks and killed “300 gooks.”  These reports epitomize the dehumanization of the enemy and disproportionate level of the killing because of the use of advanced military technologies that had been perfected since they were first used in World War I.  An internal army study on atomic weapons conveyed the American belief that the “soldier with the stronger weapons has the advantage on his side.” [115]

Bodies of U.S., British, and ROK soldiers before a mass burial at Koto-ri on Dec. 8, 1950 (Photo by Sgt. F. C. Kerr)

U.S. military intelligence director Charles Willoughby, notorious for supplying MacArthur with information he wanted to hear, had underestimated Chinese manpower and fighting capability.  American soldiers learned that the “best they had in the way of equipment” was “not good enough to halt a foe willing and determined to drive forward, taking any amount of losses to reach his objective.” [117]   Colonel Paul Freeman, who fought with Jiang Jieshi’s armies in World War II, said that “these are not the same Chinese.” [118]

It took more than two years to agree on a truce on July 26, 1953

Negotiations to end the war began on July 10, 1951, and dragged on for two years before the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed on July 27, 1953.  The two sides divided over the demarcation line between north and south, the presence of U.S. airfields and troop levels, and terms of the repatriation of POWs.  Truman accused the communists of delaying the end of the war and proposed a demilitarized zone (DMZ) almost entirely in the DPRK.  The communist delegation accused the UN of repeatedly bombing near their headquarters for intimidation purposes and violating provisions of a temporary cease-fire agreement, which Gen. Matthew Ridgway acknowledged.  Ridgway, the chief negotiator, worried that an armistice would allow the Chinese, “freed from this embarrassing entanglement,” to expand their aggression in Indochina and elsewhere in East Asia.  As historian James I. Matray points out, the U.S. delegation also felt pressured by Syngman Rhee’s firm opposition to anything less than reunification under his rule as a major war aim (in contrast to Kim Il-Sung’s acceptance of the 38 th parallel line) and by his orchestration of huge demonstrations demanding a new offensive north. [122]

On April 11, 1951, President Truman relieved General MacArthur of his command in Korea

In early April 1951, President Truman recalled and fired General Douglas MacArthur for insubordination, fearing that MacArthur’s aggressive policies would ignite a world war involving China and Russia.  MacArthur, with support from leading Republicans, wanted to take the war into China, despite U.S. setbacks in North Korea, and to use every means at America’s disposal, including nuclear weapons, to win the war.  He proposed a naval blockade off the Chinese coast; the bombing of China’s industrial centers, supply bases and communications networks; taking up exiled Chinese Guomindang leader Jieng Jieshi’s offer of using Chinese nationalist troops in Korea; and using Jieng’s forces for an invasion of the Chinese mainland. [124]   Gen. Matthew Ridgeway, MacArthur’s replacement, compared MacArthur to “Custer at the Little Bighorn [who] had neither eyes nor ears for information that might deter him from the swift attainment of his objective.” [125]

On April 25, 1951, Gen. MacArthur addressed an audience of 50,000 in Chicago

While Truman reasserted his control over the war, MacArthur became an icon to right-wing movements.  MacArthur gave a famous speech before Congress on April 19, 1951, in which he stated that “appeasement begets new and bloodier war” and that “old soldiers never die, they just fade away.”  He also told an interviewer that if he had not been fired, he had planned to drop between thirty to fifty atom bombs across the neck of Manchuria and “spread radio-active cobalt capable of wiping out animal life for at least 60 years.” [126]

California’s freshman Republican Senator Richard M. Nixon shrewdly capitalized on MacArthur’s downfall, giving stump speeches asserting that the “happiest group in the country will be the communists and their stooges…. The president has given them what they always wanted, MacArthur’s scalp.”  MacArthur, said Nixon, had been fired simply because “he had the good sense and patriotism to ask that the hands of our fighting men in Korea be untied.” [128]   This right-wing theme was later applied to scapegoat peace activists and liberal politicians for America’s defeat in Vietnam.  After sponsoring a Senate resolution condemning Truman’s action, Nixon received 600 hundred telegrams in less than 24 hours, all commending him, the largest spontaneous reaction he’d ever seen, which in turn helped catapult him towards the White House.  The whole episode provides a revealing window into the intensely conservative political culture in the United States and hawkish impulses which later drove the U.S. to war in Vietnam.

Bombing ‘em back to the Stone Age:  Aerial techno-war over North Korea

U.S. bombs fell on South Korea as well as on North Korea. Salvo of 500-pound bombs dropped from a U.S. B-29 on communist-controlled territory west of the Naktong River, Aug. 16, 1950 (AP photo)

The American Caesar, General Douglas MacArthur, was a boyhood friend of air power prophet Billy Mitchell, who had served under his father, Arthur, in the Philippines.  Like Mitchell, Douglas MacArthur’s worldview had been shaped by the horror of the trenches of World War I and he had adopted the view that since war was so horrible, whoever unleashed it should be obliterated; and that, in a righteous cause, there was no substitute for victory. [129]

US Air Force bombers destroy warehouses and dock facilities in Wonsan, North Korea, 1951 (US Dept of Defense-USIA)

Much of North Korea was left, in Maj. Gen. Emmett O’Donnell Jr.’s words, a “terrible mess,” with thousands of Chinese slaughtered, an estimated one million civilian casualties and hundreds of thousands of refugees.  Some of those refugees were napalmed by U.S. pilots under orders to “hit anything that moved.”  Eighteen out of 22 cities were obliterated, including 75 percent of Pyongyang and 100 percent of Sinuiju.  Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, later told an interviewer:

We slipped a note kind of under the door into the Pentagon and said, “Look, let us go up there…and burn down five of the biggest towns in North Korea – and they’re not very big – and that ought to stop it.”  Well, the answer to that was four or five screams – “You’ll kill a lot of non-combatants,” and “It’s too horrible.”  Yet over a period three years or so…we burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea, too… Now, over a period of three years this is palatable, but to kill a few people to stop this from happening – a lot of people can’t stomach it. [132]

F86 Sabre jet fighter, Jan. 31, 1951

The U.S. Air Force had pioneered airborne-radar early warning systems, some set up on naval blimps and night-functioning electronic interceptors, which contributed to air power supremacy.  Added to these innovations were computing gun-sights conceived by MIT’s Dr. Charles S. Draper and designed by Sperry Gyroscope Company, and range radar systems that automatically determined the distance to a target. [136]

Village of Agok in northern region of North Korea hit with missiles, August 1950

Bombing accuracy had improved considerably from World War II as a result of the development of remote control and precision-guided systems designed by General Electric and Fairchild and modeled after German Luftwaffe innovations by Nazi scientists recruited under the CIA’s Operation Paperclip. [140]   This was, in addition to photographic mapping, carried out by reconnaissance planes equipped with radar scopes and pictorial computers, and Tactical Air Control Parties that used aeronautical charts and computer calculators.  The U.S. invested $120 million per year at this time in guided missiles overseen by the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology.  The thousand pound Razon bombs were equipped with radio receivers and electronic circuits in their tails.  The bombs could be remotely controlled by the bombardier, allowing for changes in range and deflection.  The twelve hundred pound Tarzons also had electronically controlled tail surfaces permitting greater control and elevation after release as well as “avionic brains” that kept it locked onto a target magnified by radar and light beams. [141]

U.S. fighter aircraft loaded with rockets

Push-button warfare was directed predominantly at major industrial plants in North Korea as well as railroads, bridges, communications centers and the electrical grid.  Schools and hospitals were also badly damaged or destroyed along with Kim Il Sung University, archeological sites, and treasured historical monuments such as the Kwangbop Buddhist temple dating to 392 A.D, the Potang City gate, the Sungryong Hall temple dating to 1429, and the Yang Myong temple dating to the 14 th century. [142]   DPRK leaders hid in deep bunkers, while villagers were forced to live in holes dug in the rubble of cities and sides of hills and caves where disease proliferated.

Battle-weary Korean civilians crowd a Korean road in late January 1951, seeking safety from the continuous fighting (UN Photo Archive).

Racial dehumanization was a pivotal factor accounting for the lack of American restraint in targeting civilians.  MacArthur believed that “the Oriental dies stoically because he thinks of death as the beginning of life.”  American bombers dropped thousands of leaflets warning civilians to stay off roads and away from facilities that might be bombed, but independent observers noted that American ground forces were much too “quick to call in overwhelming close air support to overcome any resistance in flammable Korean villages.” [146]   Pilots were often under orders not to return with any bombs.  According to Australian journalist Harry Gordon, who rode along in a B-26 Intruder, they would attack anything that moved, including ox-carts, resulting in “needless slaughter.” [147]

Thatched huts go up in flames after B-26 bombers unload napalm bombs on a village near Hanchon, North Korea, on May 10, 1951 (AP photo)

British journalist Reginald Thompson described “holocausts of death and jellied petroleum bombs spreading an abysmal desolation over whole communities. . . . In such warfare, the slayer merely touches a button and death is in the wings, blotting out the remote, the unknown people below.” The American investigative journalist I.F. Stone stated that sanitized reports of the air raids reflected a “gay moral imbecility utterly devoid of imagination – as if the flyers were playing in a bowling alley, with villages for pins.” [149]   These comments presaged Herbert Marcuse’s 1964 book, One Dimensional Man , which warned that a cult of technical efficiency coupled with the quest for military-technological supremacy and antipathy towards foreign cultures had severed human connections and empathy in industrial capitalist societies, resulting in the kind of barbaric “machine” warfare seen in Korea and later, Vietnam. [150]

Pyongyang after U.S. bombing, 1953

Freda Kirchway, in an essay in The Nation , argued that American indifference to the destruction in Korea stemmed from the population having become “hardened by the methods of mass slaughter practiced first by Germans and Japanese and then, in self-defense, adopted and developed to the pitch of perfection at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. . . . We became accustomed to ‘area bombing,’ ‘saturation’ bombing, all the hideous forms of strategic air war aimed at wiping out not only military and industrial installations but whole populations.” [151]

As peace talks stalled in 1952, the Air Force destroyed the hydroelectric plant in Suiho that provided 90 percent of North Korea’s power supply.  In blatant violation of the 1949 Geneva Convention on the Protection of Civilians in Time of War, Article 56, U.S. bombers subsequently struck three irrigation dams in Toksan, Chasan, and Kuwonga, then attacked two more in Namsi and Taechon.  The effect was to unleash flooding and to disrupt the rice supply.  An Air Force study concluded that “the Westerner can little conceive the awesome meaning which the loss of this staple commodity has for the Asian – starvation and slow death.”  After the war it took 200,000 man days of labor to reconstruct the reservoir in Toksan alone.  “Only the very fine print of the New York Times war reports mentioned the dam hits,” the historian Bruce Cumings notes, “with no commentary.” [152]

Manufacturing consent:  Media coverage of the war

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman in a landmark 1989 study, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media , examine the influence of corporate control of the mass media and the subtle rhetorical manipulations used to inculcate consent for existing U.S. policies in foreign affairs.  They adopt a “propaganda model,” refuting the notion of a free press.  The media, they argue, draw too heavily on government sources for information, generally accept official proclamations about the nobility of the U.S. role in the world, and focus attention on atrocities committed by enemies rather than allies who kill only “worthy victims.” [159]

Marguerite Higgins was the first female war correspondent to win a Pulitzer Prize

The best war correspondents like Marguerite Higgins, a Pulitzer Prize winner who had been with the U.S. army when they liberated Dachau, captured the disillusionment of U.S. soldiers and brutality of the war.  Writing in the Saturday Evening Post on August 19, 1950, Higgins said in the first weeks of the American retreat, she had “seen war harden many of our young soldiers into savagely bitter men,” noting that some had thrown down their arms or bolted in the thick of battle, “cursing their government for what they thought was embroilment in a hopeless cause.”  One GI told her to tell the American people the truth that it is an “utterly useless war,” stating that “the commies cared little for life” and were “willing to die when our boys are not.” [166]   Higgins, however, never cared to explore precisely why the North Koreans were willing to die in such great numbers and never seems to have understood the revolutionary social consciousness that pervaded much of Asia and Africa as the old imperial world order dissipated in the aftermath of World War II.  Instead she referred to the North Koreans as “red invaders” and claimed in a book endorsed by Syngman Rhee that “Korea had served as a “kind of international alarm clock to wake up the world [about communist perfidy],” and about how “we needed to arm and produce tough, hard fighting soldiers….before it was too late.” [167]   She was, as these comments imply, a major supporter of U.S. policy in the Cold War.

Wilfred Burchett: Reporting the Other Side

Australian correspondent Wilfred G. Burchett

Australian War correspondent Wilfred Burchett was an exception in reporting the war from the North Korean and Chinese side.  Starting his career in the mold of the “heroic explorer type who had secured the empire’s greatness” as his biographer Tom Heenan put it, Burchett had covered the Sino-Japanese and Pacific War where he marveled at the scale of the U.S. air raids, still “too blinkered by the pyrotechnics to notice the victims.”  Burchett’s politics shifted, however, when he broke through the military censors and reported on the dropping of the atomic bomb.  His article for the London Daily Express was titled “The Atomic Plague,” and said that the attacks had made a “blitzed Pacific island seem like Eden.”  Arriving in Korea to cover the peace talks at Kaesong and Panmunjom in July 1951, he and his British colleague Alan Winnington, who wrote for The Daily Worker , criticized the American negotiators for needlessly prolonging the war and napalming and bombing the residence of the North Korean delegation chief, General Nam-Il.  They also reported on ROK police killings in Taejon and the mistreatment of Communist POWs at Koje-do Island, including in the adoption of unethical medical experiments, torture and illegal recruitment of the prisoners for covert operations, and accused the U.S. Air Force of conducting bacteriological warfare raids.

Historian and presidential adviser Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Schlesinger, as it turns out, wrote an important book on Douglas MacArthur and the Korean War with liberal journalist Richard Rovere, The General and the President (1951), which provided a strong defense of Truman administration policies.  Supporting Korea as a just war, Schlesinger and Rovere wrote:

if the insolent aggression of the North Koreans had gone unchallenged, millions of people throughout the free world, including this important part of it, would have found rich confirmation of their fear that Russian power was in fact invincible, that American big talk was shameless bluff, and that the United Nations was a snare and delusion…. This is why President Truman determined to make at least a limited challenge to Soviet power.  He did it not because he thought that the fall of Los Angeles would follow inexorably the fall of Seoul, but because he wished to show both the Communist world and the non-Communist world that the United States was not a flour-flusher and that the United Nations – or collective security – could be made to work. [176]

Henry Kissinger, 1957, author of Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (Photo by Bettmann-Corbis)

Henry Kissinger, an influential defense intellectual at Harvard University and proponent of a ruthless brand of real-politick appealing to power-brokers in Washington, fit the norm in considering Truman’s decision to intervene in Korea to be “courageous.”  However, in his 1957 CFR book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy , he sided with the MacArthur faction, advocating the utility of restricted nuclear war.  Kissinger criticized the doctrine of limited war, believing that the U.S. should have taken advantage of its military superiority.  Fashioning himself as a modern-day Metternich (Austrian practitioner of real-politick) Kissinger raised the question of whether the U.S.S.R. “did not have more to lose from an all-out war than we did.”  Be that as it may, he said, “our announced reluctance to engage in all out war gave the Soviet bloc a psychological advantage.”  Kissinger went on to speculate that if the U.S. had “pushed back the Chinese armies even to the narrow neck of the Korean peninsula, we would have administered a setback to Communist power in its first trial at arms with the free world.“ [182]

Principled humanitarian opposition to the war was voiced by black anti-colonial activists such as W.E.B. DuBois, who was purged from the NAACP, dissident Hollywood writers like Dalton Trumbo and John Lawson, and pacifist individuals and organizations such as the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and War Resister’s League (WRL).

Mural commemorating A. J. Muste on the War Resisters League building in New York

Abraham J. Muste, a proponent of Gandhian non-violent revolutionary pacifism and a Presbyterian minister affiliated with the FOR, considered Dresden and Hiroshima to be symbols of the nation’s lack of moral and humanitarian scruples that carried over into the Korean War.  In his 1950 FOR pamphlet, Korea: Spark to Set a World on Fire?   Muste wrote that the U.S. was intervening in a civil war on behalf of a corrupt and repressive puppet regime associated with a “white nation” that many identified with Western conquest, all of which was sure to invite Korean resistance.  The war was thus a futile undertaking, and a danger to the world as well, as it threatened to ignite World War III.  Muste called for nonviolent disobedience directed against it. [187]

Singer Paul Robeson

Paul Robeson, the great singer and civil rights leader called the Korean War “the most shameful war in which our country has ever been engaged”:

A hundred thousand American dead, wounded and missing have been listed in this war … and more than that we have killed, maimed and rendered homeless a million Koreans, all in the name of preserving Western civilization.  U.S. troops have acted like beasts, as do all aggressive, invading, imperialist armies.  North and South of the 38 th parallel, they have looked upon the Korean people with contempt, calling them filthy names, raped their women, lorded it over old women and children, and shot prisoners in the back. [196]

Scott Nearing, a former economist at the University of Pennsylvania who had been fired for opposing World War I, was another fierce and prescient critic of government policy.  Nearing emphasized that Truman and Acheson’s big idea that peace could be secured through concentrated power had been previously attempted by Julius Caesar.  Pointing to the grand imperial designs of MacArthur, including the desire to convert Taiwan into an imperial Pacific center for the purpose of dominating all Asiatic ports, Nearing characterized the Cold War as a “mad adventure” that would “deplete natural resources, squander capital, divert human ingenuity and enterprise into destructive channels and deluge the human race with blood and tears,” as Korea exemplified.   Nearing further lamented how science and technology had been mobilized for the purpose of increasing the destructive potential of explosives, incendiaries, chemical agencies and bacteriological forces, and that industrial organizations and academic institutions had placed their facilities at the disposal of a government which aims to destroy and kill with maximum effectiveness, using its military apparatus to effect “organized destruction” and “wholesale murder.” [197]

Folk singer Woodie Guthrie

In an ode to “Mr. Sickyman Ree,” Woody adopted subtle political commentary mixed with sarcasm in proclaiming, “Mister Sickiman Ree, Dizzy Old Sigman Ree, you can’t fool pore me!”  “Korean Bad Weather” and “Han River Woman” conveyed Woody’s desire for the “GI Joes from Wall Street” as he referred to U.S. soldiers in several songs, to “lay down their killing irons and walk home.”  In Han River Mud,” he sang that I “told you not to come here Joe with your Wall Street jeep all stuck in the land.  What did you drive here for Joe, try to steal my land from me.”

In a critical autobiographical war-story called “The Secret,” author James Drought, a Korean War veteran, tells the story of Frank Nolan, a working class kid from Chicago he knew who enlisted in the army to see the world and escape working for Ford Motor Company.  Trained as an infantryman, Nolan was sent out on a dangerous mission to reclaim a nondescript hill the “gooks” had occupied, largely as a means of impressing a visiting Congressional delegation.  The North Korean forces had learned of the attack in advance and slaughtered his unit; Nolan lost his leg.  After being awarded a bronze star and Purple Heart while lying in hospice, Nolan told the Congressman and General sent to congratulate him that “they could cram all the goddam medals up their ass.”  Nolan told Drought as he recounts it:  “You know what they did?  They smiled at me.  They said they understood.”  “Understood what?” Drought then asked him.  “I don’t know,” Nolan responded.  “The dirty cocksuckers just patted me on the shoulder and said they understood.” [203]

Film star Marilyn Monroe helped boost morale in Korea

The class dimension in Drought’s story is epitomized in an earlier passage where he laments how he had discovered while working “like a slob” for a finance company that the “fat cats are not content to exploit us, bleed us, work us for the rest of our lives at their benefit, but they want us to win them some glory too. . . . This is why every once in a while they start a war for us to fight in.”  The experts had predicted a depression if it hadn’t been for the Korean War and the “shot in the arm [the war] gave to production, business, and even to religion – since right away everybody returned to church to pray for their brave sons overseas – was something the ‘fat cats’ had to have to prevent going under and becoming poor folks like the rest of us.”  Ernest Hemingway and others had said that war provided a once in a lifetime opportunity to test men’s manhood and courage, though it was not mentioned “what those would discover who lay ripped open after the battle, bleeding, dying, dead from monstrous wounds.” [204]

U.S. soldiers learn of the armistice

One platoon sergeant tellingly titled his memoir, Korea: A Freezing Hell on Earth (1998).  As in Vietnam, the morale of American soldiers declined with the discovery that “superiority in weapons was no guarantee of victory,” and more broadly, because most GIs did not “have the slightest idea why they were fighting in these far off hills.”  Desertion rates reached 22.5 out of 1000 by 1952, causing concern within the military.  After returning from the funeral of slain comrades, one Marine stated that the “saddest thing was that not one of them knew why they were dying.”  Black GI’s were most prone to question “why they should fight when “we have organizations like the Klu Klux Klan running certain people out of places [back home] because of their color…. Have the communists ever enslaved our people? Have they ever raped our women? Have they ever castrated our fathers, grandfathers, uncles or cousins?” [205]

Not all veterans who became critical of the war were progressive in their outlook, to be sure.  A good number believed with the political right that liberal government leaders were politicizing the war and hamstringing the Generals to the detriment of U.S. troops.  Many also considered the Koreans pejoratively as “gooks,” a term used by Drought in dialogues in “The Secret,” and characterized Korea as a primitive country and hence not worth sacrificing themselves for or “saving.”  Few understood the Korea’s colonial history or the North Korean revolution, as historian Bruce Cumings has noted, and there was little understanding of the United States role as an heir to the colonial empires.

Letter exchange between a questioning Marine, his father and Dean Acheson

The Korean War was replete with atrocities undertaken in violation of the Geneva Convention and international laws of war, which the U.S. ironically had been instrumental in establishing (four Geneva conventions of 1949).  Because of the climate of the Cold War and continued North-South division, a proper accounting and reckoning never took place, and many Koreans never were able to obtain justice for unlawful killings of their loved ones.  With the opening of new archival records, new scholarship, and establishment of South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, we can begin to discern the full truth about the human horrors that occurred and also examine some of the war’s most controversial aspects such as the treatment of POWs and allegations about chemical and biological warfare.

Cover of the South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, 2010

In the early 2000s, however, following the country’s democratic revolution, Prime Minister Kim Dae-Jung, a leader of the Kwangju uprising in 1980, established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission “to investigate incidents regarding human rights abuses, violence, and massacres” that occurred from the era of Japanese colonization through the end of authoritarian rule, focusing especially on the years of the Korean War.  Staffed by 240 people with an annual budget of $19 million, the commission conducted its investigations from December 2005 to December 2010.  The investigators literally unearthed suppressed details of massacres, digging up unmarked graves.  Of the thousands of petitions it received for investigation of wartime massacres, 82% identified the perpetrators as South Korean government agents “the police, the armed forces, or groups associated with the state,” as compared to 18 percent focusing on “enemies of the state,” meaning North Korean soldiers and communist agents.

Slaughter of South Korean prisoners at Taejon by North Koreans

North Korean soldiers subsequently massacred rightist prisoners in the same city (Taejon), in retribution, committing “bestial atrocities” according to a U.S. investigative report. [216]   The North Koreans committed some of their worst atrocities while fleeing north following the Inchon landing and U.S.-UN “liberation” of Seoul.  On September 26, according to a U.S. Army investigation, KPA soldiers drove South Korean sympathizers into the horizontal shaft of a gold mine in the Haegu area and dropped them down a vertical shaft where they were left to die.  Hundreds of others were buried alive at the airport or lined up in a railroad train station and shot.  U.S. POWs were taken on a two week “horror hike” up to Pyongyang where prisoners who could not keep up were summarily executed. [217]

No Gun Ri Peace Park Memorial

American soldiers in both the North and South took body parts as trophies and, in at least one documented case, affixed Chinese skulls to spikes on the forward sponsors of their tanks, as T.R. Ferhrenbach reported in his book This Kind of War .  Ambassador John Muccio, via Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk, gave the order to use lethal force against refugees who blocked U.S. tanks or had the potential of fomenting insurrections in UN controlled zones.  This resulted in numerous killings, including a massacre at No Gun Ri in late July 1950, where up to three hundred refugees, including women and children, were strafed and killed by U.S. planes and shot by members of the Seventh Cavalry, George Custer’s old outfit, after being forced into an eighty foot long underpass.  Norm Tinkler, a nineteen year old machine gunner who participated in the massacre, said, “we just annihilated them, it was like an Indian raid back in the old days.” [224]

Dirty little secrets:  Mistreatment of prisoners of war

North Korean prisoners of war

Albert D. Biderman, a social scientist who reviewed interviews with 235 Air Force P.O.W.’s, wrote that the Communists’ techniques were designed to “extort false confessions.”  And that the methods used were similar to that that “inquisitors had employed for centuries.”  They did nothing that “was not common practice to police and intelligence interrogators of other times and nations.”  The CIA helped fuel the flames of public passion on the issue by subsidizing the publication of Edward Hunter’s Brainwashing in Red China (1951).  The agency also began mind-control experiments of its own.  As former CIA director Richard Helms explained to journalist David Frost 25 years after the war, “We felt that it was our responsibility not to lag behind the Russians or the Chinese in this field, and the only way to find out what the risks were was to test things such as L.S.D. and other drugs that could be used to control human behavior.  These experiments went on for many years.”

To relieve stress, some American POWs smoked marijuana and even cultivated marijuana gardens while in captivity.  With time, conditions may have eased in some camps and recreational sport was allowed.  Robert Olaf Erricker, a British POW who had served with the Royal Irish Hussars, recalled playing sports and having camp Olympics and smoking marijuana that was found up in the hills.  Edward George Beckerley, a World War II veteran and socialist found some of the lectures interesting and said that he and his comrades did not feel much animosity towards the Chinese or the same hate as towards the Germans. His feeling was that “this was a war we shouldn’t have been in.”  Twenty one Americans and one Briton remained in North Korea or China after the war.  They included Clarence Adams, an African American from Tennessee who went on to make propaganda broadcasts for Radio Hanoi and was subpoenaed by the House of un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) upon his return, and James Veneris, who took the communist name “Lao Wen” worked in a steel mill and participated in the Great Leap Forward.  The Briton, Andrew Condon, proclaimed later that he had “made [his] gesture because he was “against war.  I have spent my years in China learning a lot.”

Chinese and North Korean POWs at a UN Command prison

As horribly as American POWs were treated in captivity, General Matthew Ridgeway’s office acknowledged that more prisoners died in U.S.-UN camps than in the North Korean-Chinese camps.  An estimated 6,600 enemy prisoners died in U.S.-UN camps by the end of 1951.  Britain’s chief of the defense staff, Lord Carver, stated that “the UN prisoners in Chinese hands … were certainly much better off in every way than any held by the Americans.”  Kim Sung Tae, a KPA fighter captured by the United States after the Inchon landing, told a reporter that “our life [in captivity] was nothing but misery and torture from the first days of our capture. We were beaten, starved, tortured and made to work like slaves [with many killed for acts of defiance]. We were treated worse than beasts.” [235]

“The Horror, The Horror”:  Korea’s Lieutenant Kurtz

Nichols subsequently won a spot in the Army’s Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) and became a police adviser in South Korea during the period of U.S. occupation.  He began developing teams of secret agents who would infiltrate the South Korean Labor Party and identify threats of sabotage and “commy cells.”  Through his work, Nichols developed a close friendship with South Korean leader Syngman Rhee and became one of his closest advisers.

Blaine Harden writes that, “in Nichols, Rhee discovered a back door for delivering intelligence that could influence American policy towards Korea.  He referred to the young American as ‘my son Nichols.’”  According to Air Force historian Michael Haas, the personal ties that Nichols maintained for more than a decade with a foreign head of state had no parallel in the history of U.S. military operations.  Incredibly, one had to ask “what the hell is a twenty three year old air force sergeant doing in the role of private confidante to a head of state.” [246]

Nichols met weekly and supplied arms to Kim “Snake” Chang-ryong, a former Japanese military officer who served as Rhee’s right-hand man for anticommunist score-settling and vengeance.  The “snake” was believed to have masterminded the execution of thousands of South Koreans, according to the findings of a later government inquiry.  Nichols sat in on police torture sessions where the water torture method was employed and suspects were burned with lit cigarettes and wired to a wooden-cross and subjected to electroshocks.  The capture and execution of senior communist leaders was often confirmed by cutting off their heads and sending them in gasoline cans to army headquarters in Seoul. A photo of Nichols shows him and several other army officers inspecting the heads;  in another, the head of a guerrilla leader was being pulled out of its box by the hair.

After the North Korean invasion of the South, Nichols witnessed the massacre of hundreds of South Koreans by the ROKA at Taejon.  In his memoirs, he misstated where the massacre took place in order to uphold the official army narrative that blamed the killings on the communists; an allegation reported uncritically in Roy Appleman’s official army history of the Korean War. [247]

Nichols earned the Distinguished Service Cross, the second highest medal of honor, for helping to reverse the North Korean advance at Pusan and assisting in the Inchon landing by breaking North Korean communications code.  He began running agents into North Korea who provided valuable information on Soviet aircraft jets (MIGs) and information that was used for the massive bombing and napalm attacks.  Most of the South Korean agents, however, were being set up to be killed as their cover was easily blown.  The CIA concluded that clandestine operations into the North were not only ineffective but also “morally reprehensible in that the number of lives lost and the amount of time and treasure expended was enormously disproportionate to attainments there from.” [248]

Some of the agents were POW defectors who had been tattooed with anticommunist slogans and had gone mad from the prolonged torture and agony of life in Koje-do prison camp.  This combined with their ideological indoctrination resulted in a level of “fanaticism in combat,” according to historian Michael Haas, “seldom found in any army.”  They were known to torture captured Communists sometimes in gruesome fashion and formed specialized suicide squads. [249]

A sexual predator later arrested for fondling young boys, Nichols is alleged to have been supplied with South Korean officers for his sexual pleasure.  He killed three of his own agents who tried to assassinate him after they burst into his quarters in an apparent mutiny.  Lee Kun Soon, who was shot by Nichols but survived, said Nichols was “headstrong and had a reputation that terrified many Koreans.  He didn’t care for human rights.”  In his autobiography, Nichols included a description of the methods he used to eliminate dangerous or untrustworthy agents which included throwing them out of an aircraft in a paper-packed parachute and dumping them off the back of a boat, in the nude, at high speed.”  Better yet, he said, “give [them] false information plants – and let the enemy do it for you.” [250]

Nichols’ nephew stated that after he returned home from Korea, he had a huge amount of cash which he kept in his freezer.  The money may have derived from currency manipulation schemes that were widely prevalent among army officers in Korea and the illicit selling of military equipment, though Nichols handled a lot of cash in running secret agents.  In 1957, he was relieved of his command for undisclosed abuse of authority, and put in a straitjacket and admitted for psychiatric treatment.  His nephew states that Donald told him “the government wanted to erase his brain – because he knew too much.” [251]

Nichols’ career embodies the immorality of the Korean War which gave men like him a “legal license to murder.”  An Air Force historian concluded that “Nichols had a dark side.  In wartime, he was the guy you want on your team.  In peacetime, you lock him up.” [252] These comments epitomize why war should almost always be avoided, as it rewards those with psychopathic proclivities and brings out the darkest side of human nature.

U.S. soldiers

Clarence Adams, in a posthumously published memoir edited by his daughter, details how his black regiment was sacrificed by the army command to save white troops fleeing ambush by the Chinese.  His all-black unit was ordered to turn their guns around and lay down cover fire, leaving them without protection. In another example of discrimination, Lt. Leon Gilbert of the 24 th Infantry regiment, who had won a combat infantry badge in Italy in World War II, was given the death penalty by an army court for failure to obey a command, a grossly unjust sentence unprecedented in army history.  The offense occurred in the Kunchow-Taegu area when Lt. Gilbert had not slept for six days and was suffering from dysentery.  He had been ordered to go beyond a roadblock on a suicide mission of no strategic utility, which he rationally refused to do. [254]   The Gilbert case is another example that reflects on the persecution of black American soldiers at this time.

Canada’s and Great Britain’s Korean War

US-UN delegate Lt. Gen. William K. Harrison (seated left) and North Korean-Chinese delegate Gen. Nam Il (seated right) sign the armistice agreement on July 27, 1953

In the 1952 election cycle, public dissatisfaction with the war fell on the Democratic Truman administration, enabling Republicans to win 38 more seats in the House and 36 Senatorial contests as well as the presidency.  After two years of war Americans had grown tired and frustrated, though their feelings did not translate into support for peace or anti-imperialist movements, and they failed to reckon with the wide-scale atrocities committed.  Right-wing generals promoted an early variant of the “stab in the back” myth.  General James Van Fleet wrote in Reader’s Digest in July 1953 that the military could have achieved total victory against the North Koreans and Chinese but was prevented from doing so by civilian policy-makers. [263]   Remembered in this way, the generals used even greater levels of firepower in the next conflict fought under similar circumstances in Vietnam.

In February 1972, President Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong established a new detente, breaking down Cold War stereotypes

Across the Third World, China’s prestige was heightened by the Korean War because of its role in saving the Northern regime and standing up the United States.  North Korea recovered its prewar levels of agricultural and industrial output by 1957 through the “superhuman efforts” of its population along with $1.6 billion in aid and technical assistance from the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern bloc countries.  Though warped by rigid authoritarianism, including a purging of rivals to the Kim dynasty, the northern economy was more advanced than that of the South until the late 1960s.  Presenting itself as the vanguard of world revolution striving for a fair international economic order, the DPRK provided free schooling and medical services, welfare for war invalids and families of the fallen, and sanctioned women’s rights.  Over the long term, however, North Korea developed into a militarized garrison state, in part because the Korean War never officially ended. [266]   North Korea was in turn used by the United States to broadcast the failings of state socialism, with most media depictions failing to provide any commentary on how its political evolution was impacted by the war. [267]

In remarks given in Seoul on the 60th anniversary of the Korean War armistice, Obama waxed nostalgic about the gallantry of U.S. soldiers without mentioning the vast suffering of the civilian population including from intensive U.S. bombardment.  Echoing George H.W. Bush a generation before, he said:  “We can say with confidence that war was no tie.  Korea was a victory.  When 50 million South Koreans live in freedom – a vibrant democracy, one of the world’s most dynamic economies, in stark contrast to the repression and poverty of the North – that’s a victory.”  He went on:  “For generations to come, history will recall how free nations banded together in a long Cold War, and how we won that war, let it be said that Korea was the first battle.” [276]   If Korea was the first battle in the Cold War, it did not herald any great victories, however, since it actually ended in stalemate and divided and skewed the political-economic development of both Koreas.  And most of the free nations were not actually free, including South Korea which was ruled by a dictatorship until a revolution from below in 1987.

Korea overall is a case study for showing the futility of war, as the war perpetuated rather than solved the countries’ problems and divisions.  The horrendous violence and suffering directed against the Korean people was unconscionable, furthermore, and one can hope will never be repeated.

*          *          *

[1]  James R. Kerin, “The Korean War and American Memory,” Ph.D. Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1994. [2]  Richard L. Halferty, “The Forgotten War in Korea: Remembrances of Veterans Sacrifices are Glaringly Absent,” The Washington Post , June 24, 2015.

[3]  Halferty, “The Forgotten War in Korea.”

[4]  Kerin, “The Korean War and American Memory;” Halferty, “The Forgotten War in Korea.”

[5]  Paul D. Wolfowitz, “In Korea, a Model for Iraq,” New York Times , August 30, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/opinion/31wolfowitz.html?_r=0.

[6]  George Katsiaficas, Asia’s Unknown Uprisings I: South Korean Social Movements in the 20 th Century (PM Press, 2012). See also Jeremy Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012).

[7]  John L. Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin, 2010); David J. Bercuson, Blood on the Hills: The Canadian Army in the Korean War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 229. See also David Halberstam, The Coldest Winter (New York: Hyperion, 2007).

[8] Bruce Cumings, The Korean War (New York: New American Library, 2010).

[9]  Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations , rev ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 117-124, 154-156.

[10]  Howard Zinn, Postwar America, 1945-1971 (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1973), 53, 54, 55. For larger U.S. geopolitical designs in Asia, see David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Harm America and the World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2015); America’s Asia : Dissenting Essays on Asian-American Relations , ed. Mark Selden & Edward Friedman (New York: Vintage Books, 1969).

[11] Saint Augustine quoted in Diana Preston, A Higher Form of Killing: Six Weeks in World War I That Forever Changed the Nature of War (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 7.

[12]  Marilyn B. Young, “Bombing Civilians: From the 20 th to the 21 st Centuries,” in Bombing Civilians: A 20 th Century History ed. Marilyn B. Young and Yuki Tanaka (New York: The New Press, 2009) , 160; Charles K. Armstrong, Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 48.

[13] For a profile of Yo, see Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War I: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945-1947 (Studies of the East Asian Institute). (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981).  “Far Eastern Economic Assistance Act of 1950,” https://www.loc.gov/law/help/statutes-at-large/81st-congress/session-2/c81s2ch5.pdf.

[14]  For astute insights into North Korean society and its evolution as a product of the war, see Armstrong, Tyranny of the Weak ; Heonik Kwon & Byong Ho-Chung, North Korea: Beyond Charismatic Politics (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012) and Bruce Cumings, North Korea: Another Country ( New York: The Free Press, 2004).

[15]  Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little & Brown, 1980), 473. North Korean officials later claimed the U.S. actually bombed their residence as future negotiations were stalled.

[16] For a detailed history, Michael J. Seth, A History of Korea: From Antiquity to the Present (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010).

[17] Dae-Sook Suh, The Korean Communist Movement, 1918-1948 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1967), 132.

[18] Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War , I, 36-38; Chong Sik-Lee, Counterinsurgency in Manchuria: The Japanese Experience, 1921-1940 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, January 1967). Kim Sok-Won was thought responsible for the massacre of Chinese citizens in Manchuria.

[19]  Mark Caprio, “Neglected Questions on the ‘Forgotten War’: South Korea and the United States on the Eve of the Korean War,” The Asia-Pacific Journal , January 31, 2011; Reinhard  Drifte, “Japan’s Involvement in the Korean War,” in The Korean War in History , ed. James Cotton and Ian Neary (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989), 120-134; Tessa Morris Suzuki, “The U.S., Japan and the Undercover War in Korea,” in The Korean War in Asia: A Hidden History  (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), 175; and Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Post-War Warriors: Japanese Combatants in the Korean War,” The Asia-Pacific Journal , Vol 10, Issue 31, No. 1, July 30, 2012.

[20]  Quoted in Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on  Foreign Relations and United States Fo reign Policy (New York: Authors Choice Press, 1977), 228. For strategic planning after World War II, see also Noam Chomsky, For Reasons of State  (New York: Pantheon, 1973).

[21]  William L. Neumann, America Encounters Japan: From Perry to MacArthur (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 2; Sentimental Imperialists: The American Experience in Southeast Asia , ed. James C. Thompson, Peter W. Stanley, John Curtis Perry (New York: Harper & Row, 1981).

[22]  See Franz Schurman, The Logic of World Power: An Inquiry Into the Origins, Currents, and Contradictions of World Politics (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 197; “Washington Round-Up,” Aviation Week , July 2, 1951; Robert E. Herzstein , Henry R. Luce, Time and the American Crusade in Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

[23]  James Peck, Washington’s China: The National Security World, the Cold War, and the Origins of Globalism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 5.

[24]  See William Hinton, Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York: Vintage Books, 1966) and Mark Selden, China in Revolution: The Yennan Way Revisited (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1995).

[25]  Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: Norton, 1997), 210; Thomas J. McCormick, America’s Half Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War and After 2 nd ed. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 116.

[26]  Charles K. Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Wilfred G. Burchett, This Monstrous War (Melbourne, Joseph Waters, 1952), 43-45; Suzy Kim, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013); Anna Louise Strong, In North Korea: First Eye-Witness Report (New York: Soviet Russia Today, 1949), 11. For more on Kim’s background, see Dae-Sook Suh, Kim Il Sung: The North Korean Leader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

[27]  Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution , 155, 56.

[28]  Kim, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 , 77, 86, 87, 88, 89, 98, 175.

[29]  Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 , ch. 6.

[30]  Kim, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 , 221.

[31] Jeremy Kuzmarov, Police Training, “Nation-Building,” and Political Repression in Postcolonial South Korea,” The Asia Pacific Journal , July 1, 2012, http://apjjf.org/2012/10/27/Jeremy-Kuzmarov/3785/article.html

[32]  Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 , 230, 231.

[33]  Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 , 233-235.

[34] Brett Reilly, “Cold War Transition: Europe’s Decolonization and Eisenhower’s System of Subordinate Elites,” in Endless Empire: Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Decline (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 350.

[35]  Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings, Korea: The Unknown War (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 23; Dong-Choon Kim, The Unending Korean War: A Social History, trans. Sung-ok Kim (Larkspur, Calif.: Tamal Vista Publications, 2000), 80; Mark Gayn, Japan Diary (New York: William Sloane, 1948), 352.

[36]  Burchett, This Monstrous War, Mitchell, “Control of the Economy during the Korean War: The 1952 Coordination Agreement and its Consequences,” in The Korean War in History , ed. Cotton and Neary, 153; Bruce Cumings, Origins of the Korean War, II: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947-1950 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press ,1990), 137, 151, 470.

[37]  Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression , ch. 4; Gregory Henderson, Korea; The Politics of the Vortex (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); Richard D. Robinson, “Betrayal of a Nation,” Unpublished Manuscript, 1960 (courtesy of Harvard Yenching Library),

[38] See my Modernizing Repression , chapter 4; Katsiaficas, Asia’s Unknown Uprisings: Vol 1 . In Waegwon, rioters cut off the police chief’s eyes and tongue. The Soviet ambassador to North Korea paid some money to rebels through a liaison, though these revolts would have taken place anyways as the conditions were ripe in South Korea for rebellion, and the Soviet involvement was minimal.

[39]  Kim, The Unending Korean War .

[40]  Walter Sullivan, “Police Brutality in Korea Assailed: Torture, Wholesale Executions of Reds Held Driving People Into Arms of Communists,” New York Times , February 1, 1950, 3.

[41]  Gordon Young, Journey From Banna (Xilibris, 2011), 159.

[42]  For the historical pattern, see John Tirman, The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

[43]  Margaret Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963), 328-349; Bryan R. Gibby, The Will to Win: American Military Advisors in Korea, 1946-1953 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012); Col. Robert Heinl Jr. Victory at High Tide: The Inchon-Seoul Campaign (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1968), 227. On police training, see Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression . Arms and equipment were valued at over $110 million.

[44] Hun Joon Kim, The Massacres at Mt. Halla: Sixty Years of Truth Seeking in South Korea (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 35; Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War II , 2:250–59; John Merrill, The Peninsular Origins of the War (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989), 125; Sheila Myoshi Jager, Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea (New York: W.W. Norton, 2014), 53.

[45]  Kim, The Massacre at Mt. Halla , 34.

[46]  Merill, Korea , 100; Kim, The Massacres at Mt. Halla , 34; Katsiaficas, Asia’s Unknown Uprisings , 100; Carl Mydans, More Than Meets the Eye (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), 292; Carl Mydans, “Revolt in Korea: A New Communist Uprising Turns Men Into Butchers,” Life , November 15, 1948, 55-58.

[47]  John Foster Dulles, “’To Save Humanity from the Deep Abyss,’” New York Times Magazine , July 30, 1950, reprinted in The Korean War, ed. Lloyd C. Gardner (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1972), 84-85.

[48]  Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War II , 285, 286, 402, 472; Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself , 328-349; Gibby, The Will to Win .

[49]  Cumings, The Korean War , 10, 11; Stephen L. Endicott, James G. Endicott: Rebel Out of China (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 280; Sir John Pratt, Korea: the Lie That led to War (Britain-China Friendship Association, 1951), https:www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/1951/korea.htm; John Gunther, The Riddle of MacArthur: Japan, Korea and the Far East (New York: Praeger, 1975 ) , 165; Armstrong, Tyranny of the Weak , 16; and Wilfred G. Burchett, This Monstrous War (Melbourne: Joseph Waters, 1953), 69, 68.  Roberts admitted that he ordered the launching of raids and that attacks were carried out against the North by ROK units on their own volition.  For insightful analysis, see Caprio, “Neglected Questions on the ‘Forgotten War.’”

[50]  Report, Major Millard Shaw, Acting Advisor, “Guard of the 38th Parallel by the National Police,” cited in Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression , ch. 4; Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, II:129, 195.

[51] Gregory Henderson, “Korea, 1950,” in The Korean War in History , ed. James Cotton and Ian Neary, 179; Donald Nichols, How Many Times Can I Die? (Brooksville, FL: Vanity Press, 1981); and Burchett, This Monstrous War , 78.  Nichols is considered the founding father of the air force’s human intelligence program.

[52] “On the  20 th Anniversary of the Korean War – An Informal Memoir by the Office of Research Estimates Korean Desk Officer, Circa 1948-1950,” RG 263, Records of the CIA, History Source Collection of the DCI History Staff, 1945-1950, box 4, folder Korea, National Archives, College Park Maryland.

[53]  Jager, Brothers at War , 62; Wada Haruki, The Korean War: An International History (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013); Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 and Armstrong, Tyranny of the Weak , 10, 14, 16. In March 1949, Kim had visited Stalin in Moscow and told him “we believe that the situation makes it necessary and possible to liberate the whole country through military means,” though Stalin demurred saying it was preferable to wait for a provocation from the South and counter-attack. Scholars who blame Stalin and Mao for the outbreak of war, according to Armstrong, give short shrift to the internal political dynamic while obscuring the aspirations of the North Korean revolution.

[54]  James Carroll, House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 192; Stanley Sandler, The Korean War: No Victors, No Vanquished (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 109; Amstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 , 230; and Burchett, This Monstrous War , 84, 86, 87, 88.

[55]  Michael H. Hunt and Steven I. Levine, Arc of Empire: America’s Wars in Asia from the Philippines to Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); John L. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University, 1982), 111, 112; Letter to the editor, Weekly Star , Robert Kerr Papers, U.S. Foreign Relations, clippings, Box 5, Carl Albert Congressional Research Center, Norman, Oklahoma; and Gerard Colby, DuPont Dynasty (Seacaucus, New Jersey: Lyle Stuart Inc., 1984), 400.

[56]  John T. McNay, Acheson and Empire: The British Accent in American Foreign Policy (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001); Robert L. Beisner, Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 332; Peck, Washington’s China , 36. Supporting the perpetuation of white minority rule in Africa and cultivating ties with white supremacist leaders in South Africa and Northern Rhodesia (Roy Welensky), Acheson’s worldview was straight out of the 19 th century era of great power competition.

[57]  MacArthur quoted in Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century , 470.

[58] Steven Casey, Selling the Korean War: Propaganda, Politics and Public Opinion in the United States, 1950-1953 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Harry F. Kofksy, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993).

[59] “The Time in Korea,” Time Magazine July 10, 1950, 9.

[60] Hajimu Masuda, Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 60, 61, 167, 201; Constituent letters, Robert S Kerr Collection, legislative, box 5, Carl Albert Congressional Research Center, Norman Oklahoma.

[61]  Mary S. McAuliffe, Crisis on the Left: Cold War Politics and American Liberals, 1947-1954 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978), 84.  Joseph McCarthy inveighed against the Truman administration’s creation of a “Korean death trap,” saying that we can lay it “at the doors of the Kremlin and those who sabotaged rearming, including Acheson and the President.”

[62]  Charles J. Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe and Martha Mendoza, The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 144.

[63]  Ronald J. Caridi, “The GOP and the Korean War,” Pacific Historical Review , 37, 4 (November 1968), 425; Ronald J. Caridi, The Korean War and American Politics: The Republican Party as a Case Study (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), 31, 34, 35; “The Congress: ‘Time for Unity,’” Time Magazine , July 10, 1950, 8. Party luminaries like Herbert Hoover, advocate for establishing a “Gibraltar of the Western hemisphere” and isolationism towards the rest of the world and Thomas Dewey also voiced their support for a war against “communist aggression.”

[64]  Senator Robert Taft, “The President Has No Right to Involve the United States in a Foreign War,” In We Who Dared Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing From 1812 to Now , ed. Murray Polner and Thomas E. Woods Jr. (New York: Perseus, 2008), 200-205.

[65]  McAuliffe, Crisis on the Left , 72.

[66]  Matthew E. Mantell, “Opposition to the Korean War: A Study in American Dissent,” Ph.D. Dissertation, NYU, 1973. On Niebuhr, see The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr , ed. Robert M. Brown (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). See also Arthur Schlesinger Jr . The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (New York: 1949).

[67] McAuliffe, Crisis on the Left , 76; Roger Biles, Liberal Crusader: Paul H. Douglas of Illinois (De Kalb: Northern University Illinois Press, 2002); Robert Sherrill and Harry W. Ernst, The Drugstore Liberal (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1968). Wayne Morse (R-OR, later independent), one of two senators to oppose the Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorizing war in Vietnam, joined in a “clear pledge to back up the president in his statement for the defense of America’s security in Asia.” Morse expressed the prevailing liberal relief that “we have at long last…made clear to the freedom loving peoples of the world that the false, lying, vicious communist propaganda which would make it appear they cannot count on the U.S. to defend freedom in the world is really false and lying and vicious.” However after MacArthur crossed the 38 th parallel, Morse was more of the dissenter, stating that “when we pull back the veil of the war propaganda of those who are advocating expanding the war in Asia, we are confronted with the ugly proposal on the part of their growing war clique in the U.S. that we commit an act which constitutes for the first time in American history an aggressive act of war against a foreign power.” Caridi, The Korean War and American Politics , 183.

[68] Ronnie Dugger,  The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson The Drive For Power From the Frontier to Master of the Senate (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1982) 364-65, 370-71.  

[69] John C. Culver and John Hyde,  American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001); O liver Stone and Peter Kuznick, An Untold History of the United States (New York: Gallery Books, 2012), 221; and Culver & Hyde, American Dreamer , 456-457.

[70]  McAuliffe, Crisis on the Left , 75.

[71]  McAuliffe, Crisis on the Left, 84.

[72]  Caridi, “The GOP and the Korean War,” 429, 430.

[73]  Republican Party Platforms: “Republican Party Platform of 1952,” July 7, 1952. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25837.

[74]  Alan Schaffer, Vito Marcantonio : Radical in Congress (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1966), 204.

[75]  Mantell, “Opposition to the Korean War,” 26.

[76]  Mantell, “Opposition to the Korean War,” 28.

[77]  John M. Swomley Jr., The Military Establishment , foreword by Senator George McGovern (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 209. Graham quoted in Kevin M. Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 61. On Spellman’s career, see John Cooney, The American Pope: The Life and Times of Cardinal Spellman (New York: Crown, 1984).

[78] Weyand quoted in Charles Maechling Jr., “Counterinsurgency: The First Ordeal by Fire,” in Low Intensity Warfare: Counterinsurgency, Proinsurgency and Antiterrorism in the Eighties , ed. Michael T. Klare and Peter Kornbluh (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 43.

[79]  Kompton quoted in Vannevar Bush, Endless Horizons (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1946). The use of the latest death technologies is detailed in U.S. Marines in the Korean War , ed. Charles R. Smith (Washington, D.C.: United States Marine Corps History Project, 2007). On the pioneering use of helicopters, see Lynn Montross , Cavalry of the Sky: The Story of U.S. Marine Combat Helicopters (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954). On guided missiles, see David Anderton, “Project Typhoon Aids Missile Designers: New Electronic Computer Can Solve Problem of Entire Defense System,” Aviation Week , December 18, 1950, and on drones, Lindesay Parrott, “Air War Now Main Effort in Korea,” New York Times , September 21, 1952.

[80]  E.F. Bullene, “Wonder Weapon: Napalm,” U.S. Army Combat Forces Journal , November 1952; Earle J. Townsend, “They Don’t Like ‘Hell Bombs’” Washington Armed Forces Chemical Association, January 1951; Cumings, The Korean War . See also Robert M. Neer, Napalm: An American Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Napalm was developed by Harvard scientists encompassing napthenate and coconut palm added to gasoline at the end of World War II. Experimental missions were carried out on French civilians at the end of the war, including by bombardier Howard Zinn who became a life-long pacifist thereafter. See his You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002).

[81]  Reginald Thompson, Cry Korea : The Korean War – A Reporters’ Notebook (Reportage Press, 2010), 94.

[82]  Kim, The Unending Korean War. In May 2008, the U.S. government declassified images of massacres by South Korean forces, including the massacre at Taejon (see AP Photo in essay, once classified as “top secret,” of massacre at Taejon in July 1950.) See “Alleged communists massacred under the eyes of American soldiers,” The Observers , June 13, 2008, https://observers.france24.com/en/20080613-south-korea-massacre-US-army-photos.

[83]  Allan Millett, They Came From the North: The War for Korea 1950-1951 (University Press of Kansas, 2010), 95; Callum MacDonald, Korea : The War before Vietnam (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 42; Sandler, The Korean War , 60. Dong Choon Kim notes that it was like a reenactment of the Hideyoshi invasions of the sixteenth century, rank and file soldiers and the righteous army defended the country with their own body after the King and government troops had fled.

[84]  “New Enemy Tactics,” 8 th Army War Diaries, July 18-26, 1950, G-2 Staff Section Report, July 18, 1950, U.S. Army, Unit Diaries, History and Reports, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence Missouri, box 6; “The Tank-Killing Shaped Charge,” Life Magazine , October 23, 1950, 67; Andrew Cockburn, The Threat: Inside the Soviet Military Machine (New York: Random House, 1983), 138; Sandler, The Korean War ; Kim, The Unending Korean War.

[85]  Cumings, Origins of the Korean War II , 667; Armstrong, Tyranny of the Weak , 26; Hajimu, Cold War Crucible , 58, 59, 78; John W. Riley Jr. and Wilbur Schramm, The Reds Take a City (NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1951).

[86] “Statement by Detective Who Left Seoul, 20 July 1950,” 31 July 1950 in RG 338, Records of the U.S. Army Operations, Tactical and Support, box 58, National Archives, College Park Maryland; Kim, The Unending Korean War , 134-135; Gavan McCormack and Stewart Lone, Korea Since 1850 (London: St. Martin’s, 1993), 120; Report of the Committee on Government Operations Made Through its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Subcommittee on Korean War Atrocities, Jan. 7, 1954 (U.S. G.P.O., 1954), 4-6.

[87]  John Melady, Korea; Canada’s Forgotten War (Toronto: McMillan, 1983), 56; Halberstam, The Coldest Winter ; Sandler, The Korean War , 56, 76.

[88]  William W. Epley, “America’s First Cold War Army” (Arlington, VA: The Institute of Land Warfare, 1999).

[89]  Alfred R. Hausrath, “The KMAG Advisor: Role and Problems of the Military Advisor in Developing an Indigenous Army for Combat Operations in Korea” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Operational Research Office, 1957), 29.

[90]  Kim, The Unending Korean War , 130.

[91]  In Donald Knox, The Korean War: Pusan to Chosin: An Oral History (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 94.

[92]  In Andrew Salmon, Scorched Earth, Black Snow: Britain and Australia in the Korean War (London: Aurum, 2011), 65.

[93]  Heinl Jr. Victory at High Tide , 69, 102. See also Richard P. Hallion, The Naval Air War in Korea (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011) ; Eugene Clark, The Secrets of Inchon: The Untold Story of the Most Daring Mission of the Korean War (New York: G.P. Putnam, 2002).

[94] Suh Hee-Kyung, “Mass Civilian Killings by South Korean and U.S. Forces: Atrocities Before and During the Korean War,” Critical Asian Studies , 4, 12 (December 2010); Jon T. Hoffman, Chesty: The Story of Lieutenant General Lewis B. Puller, USMC (New York: Random House, 2002), 354; Heinl Jr., Victory at High Tide , 168. The city, Puller acknowledged, “lay in smoking ruins” after his men passed through it having asked and received MacArthur’s permission to put it to the torch.

[95]   U.S. Marines in the Korean War , ed. Smith, 166, 178; Heinl Jr., Victory at High Tide ; 237; 242; Thompson, Cry Korea ; Marguerite Higgins, War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1951), 171. Reprisal killings were taken against northern collaborators when Seoul was retaken. Thompson, a correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph described Seoul as an “appalling inferno of din and destruction with the tearing noise of Corsair dive bombers blasting right ahead and the livid flashes of tank guns, the harsh, the fierce crackle of blazing wooden buildings, telegraph and high tension poles collapsing in utter chaos of wires. Great palls of smoke lie over us as massive buildings collapse in showers of sparks, puffing masses of smoke and rubble upon us in a terrific heat.”

[96] Lynn Montross, Cavalry of the Sky (New York: Harper, 1954), 173; Captain Walter G. Atkinson Jr., “Use of Portable Flamethrowers in 1 st Cavalry Division Sector,” August 30, 1950, RG 338, Records of the U.S Army Operations, Eighth Army Chemical Corps, Historical Files, Box 1433, National Archives, College Park Maryland.

[97]  Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings, Korea: The Unknown War (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 163; Mark. J. Reardon, “Chasing a Chameleon: The U.S. Army Counterinsurgency Experience in Korea, 1945-1952,” In The U.S. Army and Irregular Warfare, 1775-2007 , ed. Richard G. Davis (U.S. Army Center of Military History, 2008), 226; Paul F. Braim, The Will to Win: The Life of General James A. Van Fleet (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2001), 202.

[98]  Kim, The Unending Korean War , 159; “Bandit Activities in South Korea,” in Command Report, Headquarters, Korean Communications Zone, September 1952, RG 554, Records of the General Headquarters, Far East Command, box 1, National Archives, College Park Maryland.

[99]  Richard S. Ehrlich, “Death of a Dirty Fighter,” Asia Times , July 8, 2003; Stephen C. Mercado, The Shadow Warriors of Nakano: A History of the Imperial Japanese Army’s Intelligence School (Washington: D.C. Brassey’s, 2002), 224; Randall B. Woods, Shadow Warrior: William Egan Colby and the CIA (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 224. Poshepny was the prototype for Lt. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now , a rogue CIA agent who embraced the dark side.

[100]  William B. Breuer, Shadow Warriors: The Covert War in Korea (New York: John Wiley, 1996); Colonel Ben S. Malcolm, White Tigers: My Secret War in North Korea , with Ron Martz (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1992).

[101]  Col. Michael E. Haas, Apollo’s Warriors: U.S. Air Force Special Operations During the Cold War (Maxwell Air Force Base: Air University Press, 1997), 26-27.

[102]  Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 56, 57; Mercado, The Shadow Warriors of Nakano , 231; Nichol, How Many Times Can I Die?; Morris-Suzuki, “The U.S., Japan, and the Undercover War,” in T he Korean War in Asia , ed. Morris-Suzuki, 180-182; Catherine Churchman, “Victory with Minimum Effort: How Nationalist China ‘Won’ the Korean War,” in The Korean War in Asia , ed. Morris-Suzuki, 82; and Morris-Suzuki, “Post-War Warriors: Japanese Combatants in the Korean War.”  Jack Canon had served with military intelligence in Papua New Guinea during World War II and went on to undercover work in the Mediterranean and Middle East.  In 1958, he was tried in a military court for stealing ammunition and displaying threatening behaviors.  In March 1981, he committed suicide, shooting himself in his garage in Hidalgo Texas.

[103]  Hanley, Choe and Mendoza, The Bridge at No Gun Ri , 170.

[104] Paul M. Edwards, Korean War Almanac (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2006), pp. 103, 110.

[105] John S. Brown (U.S. Army Chief of Military History), “The Korean War: The Chinese Intervention,” online: http://www.history.army.mil/brochures/kw-chinter/chinter.htm.

[106] Historical Report for Period Ending 31 December 1952, War Crimes Division, Col. Claudius O. Wolfe, Zone Staff Judge Advocate and Major Jack R. Todd, JAGC, RG 554, Records of the General Headquarters, Korea Communications Zone, War Crimes Historical Files, War Crimes, box 20; Francis Hill, CAO, I Corps, November 10, 1950; November 16, 1950, Headquarters, 8 th U.S. Army, EUSAK, Civil Assistance Section, 10 November 1950, RG 338, 8 th U.S. Army, National Archives College Park Maryland, box 3403; 24 th CIC Detachment War Diary, July 1-November 1, 1950, RG 338, Records of U.S. Army Operations, 24 th Infantry, box 3483, National Archives, College Park Maryland.

[107]  Mantell, “Opposition to the Korean War,” 156; Armstrong, Tyranny of the Weak , 38; Callum McDonald, “So Terrible a Liberation’: The UN Occupation of North Korea,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 12, 2 (April-June 1991): 10; Halliday and Cumings, Korea , 163; Katsiaficas, Asia’s Unknown Uprisings ; Knox, The Korean War , 413; Dong-choon Kim, “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Korea: Uncovering the Hidden Korean War,” The Asia-Pacific Journal , March 1, 2010; Cumings, The Korean War , 198, 199.

[108]  Kim, The Unending Korean War , 157; McCormack and Lone, Korea Since 1850 , 150; Cumings, Origins of the Korean War II , 721.

[109]  Shu Guang Zhang. Mao’s Military Romanticism: China and the Korean War, 1950-1953 ( Lawrence: University Press of Kansas , 1995); Chen Jian, China’s Road to the Korean War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Jager, Brothers at War , 56.

[110]  Gibby, The Will to Win , 218; Bercuson, Blood on the Hills , 65.

[111]  Montross, Cavalry of the Sky , 219.

[112] Glenn Garvin, “TV Review – When Hell Froze Over – the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir,” Miami Herald , March 25, 2013, http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/03/25/3305875/tv-review-when-hell-froze-over.html ; Fehrenbach, This Kind of War , 375; Fehrenbach, This Kind of War , 375; Eric Hammel, Chosin: Heroic Ordeal of the Korean War (Zenith Press, 2007).

[113] American embassy Manila to Secretary of State, “A New Year Message to the Filipino Army from the HMB,” February 9, 1951, RG 59, Records of the Department of State, Philippines, 796.001, National Archives, College Park Maryland, Box 4319.

[114] Andrew Cockburn, “Follow the Money,” in The Pentagon Labyrinth , ed. Winslow T. Wheeler (Washington, D.C.: World Security Institute, 2011), 79; Halberstam, The Coldest Winter ; Jerome S. Brower, Harold P. McCormick, “The Use of Incendiary Bombs for Cereal Crop Destruction,” May 29, 1951, RG 338, Records of the U.S Army Operations, Eighth Army Chemical Corps, Historical Files, Box 1433, National Archives, College Park Maryland.

[115]  1st Lieutenant Hubert D. Deatherage, Heavy Mortar Company, 5th Infantry Regiment, Platoon Leader, 3rd platoon, Kunchon, September 24, Chemical Staff Section Report, January 21, 1951, RG 338, Records of U.S. Army Operational, Tactical and Support Organization, 1951-1952, 8th U.S. Army, National Archives, College Park Maryland, Box 1433; Dick Coburn, Donald D. Bode, Arnold J. Reinikka, “Introduction to Atomic Weapons,” October 4, 1951, RG 338, Records of the U.S. Army Operational, Tactical and Support Organizations, 1951-1952, Eighth Army, National Archives, College Park Maryland, Box 1434.

[116]  T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness (New York: McMillan, 1963), 406; Salmon, Scorched Earth, Black Snow , 307; Montross, Cavalry of the Sky , 219.  For comparison with Vietnam, see Nick Turse, ‘ Kill Anything That Moves’: The Real America War in Vietnam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014).

[117]  Richard J.H. Johnston, “Outnumbered GIs Lost Faith in Arms: Morale Hard Hit as the Enemy, Disregarding His Losses, Retained the Initiative,” New York Times , December 10, 1950, 5.

[118]  Halberstam, The Coldest Winter , 403, 473.

[119]  Roy E. Appleman, Disaster in Korea: The Chinese Confront MacArthur (College Station, TX: Texas A &M Pres, 1989), 360; Garrett Underhill and Ronald Schiller, “The Tragedy of the U.S. Army,” Look Magazine , February 13, 1951, 27.

[120] Garrett Underhill and Ronald Schiller, “The Tragedy of the U.S. Army,” Look Magazine, February 13, 1951, 27-28.

[121]  Fehrenbach, This Kind of War , 470.

[122] James I. Matray, “Mixed Message: The Korean Armistice Negotiations at Kaesong,” Pacific Historical Review , 81, 2 (May 2012), 221-244; Brandon K. Gauthier, “Korea: What it was like to Negotiate with North Korea 60 Years Ago,” The Atlantic Monthly , July 26, 2013; Burchett, This Monstrous War , 123-166. Echoing historian Clay Bair, Matray concludes that “it was the UNC that had established the acrimonious tone for the truce negotiations with its insulting opening proposal. It acted on instructions from Ridgway, who seemed more interested in proving his toughness and placating Rhee than in reaching a quick settlement.”

[123] Charles S. Young, Name, Rank and Serial Number: Exploiting Korean War POWs at Home and Abroad (New York: Oxford, 2014).  See also H. Bruce Franklin’s classic, M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1993).

[124]  Ronald J. Caridi, “The GOP and the Korean War,” Pacific Historical Review , 37, 4 (November 1968), 432.

[125]  Michael A. Bellesiles, A People’s History of the United States Military: Ordinary Soldiers Reflect on Their Experience of War, From the American Revolution to Afghanistan (New York: The New Press, 2012), 262 quoting Ridgeway; Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War , Vol. II; Stanley Weintraub, MacArthur’s War: Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero (New York: The Free Press, 2000).

[126]  Cumings, Origins of the Korean War II ; Schurman, The Logic of World Power .

[127]  William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880-1964 (New York: Laurel, 1978), 776; Richard H. Rovere and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. The General and the President and the Future of American Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Young, 1951), 12.

[128]  Manchester, American Caesar , 780.

[129]  Manchester, American Caesar ; Fehrenbach, This Kind of War , 427, 428.

[130]  Heinl Jr., Victory at High Tide , 76; “”MacArthur on Air Power,” Aviation Week , April 30, 1951, 12; Manchester, American Caesar , 150-151.

[131]  Futrell, “Tactical Employment of Strategic Air Power in Korea,” 40. For technological innovations, see also Richard P. Hallion, The Naval Air War in Korea (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011).

[132] Halliday and Cumings, Korea: The Unknown War , 117-118. According to Cumings, a partial table of the destruction shows: Pyongyang – 75%; Chongjin – 65%; Hamhung – 80%; Hungnam – 85%; Sariwon – 95%; Sinaju – 100%; Wonsan– 80%. Napalming of refugees is discussed in Tirman, The Deaths of Others , 104-05.

[133] H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 116.

[134]  “MacArthur on Air Power,” Aviation Week , April 30, 1951, 12. The industry generally spent hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on public relations. Robert H. Wood, “How a Business Press Can Serve Its Industry,” Aviation Week , February 23, 1953.

[135] Charles K. Armstrong,  “The Destruction and Reconstruction of North Korea, 1950 – 1960,” The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol. 8, Issue 51 No 2, December 20, 2010; Xiaoming Zhang, Red Wings over the Yalu: China, the Soviet Union, and the Air War in Korea (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002); E. Bregeweid, December 27, 1950, RG 342, U.S. Air Force Command, Mission Reports  of Units in Korean War, box 21, National Archives, College Park Maryland.

[136] Hanson W. Baldwin “The Whales of the Air Are Flying Again,” New York Times , August 14, 1955; Philip J. Klass, “Avionics New Role in Air Power,” Aviation Week , February 25, 1952, 65; “Avionics Puts Fighter on Target,” Aviation Week , March 2, 1953, 139. Blimps served as platforms for radar sentinels and electronic control systems designed to warn of enemy planes while engaging in antisubmarine warfare.

[137]  Theodore Von Karman to Hap Arnold, December 15, 1945, in Prophecy Fulfilled: Towards a ‘New Horizon and Its Legacy’ , ed. Michael H. Gorn (Create Space Publishing, 2012); Richard P. Hallion, George. Watson Jr., David Chenoweth, Technology and the Air Force: A Retrospective Assessment (Washington, D.C.: Air Force and Museums Program, 1997).

[138]  Hallion, The Naval Air War in Korea ; “Matador Opens New Era of Missile Warfare,” Aviation Week , September 24, 1951, 219; Lindesay Parrot, “Air War Now Main Effort in Korea,” New York Times, September 21, 1952; William B. Harwood, Raise Heaven and Earth: The Story of Martin Marietta People and Their Pioneering Achievements (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 252, 252. On origins see also Kenneth P. Werrell, The Evolution of the Cruise Missile (Maxwell, Air Force Base: Air University Press, 1985), 7, 36; Gordon Bruce, “Aerial Torpedo is Guided 100 Miles by Gyroscope,” New York Tribune , October 20, 1915, 1.

[139]  “Navy Uses Robot Missiles against Targets in Korea,” New York Times , September 18, 1952; William J. Coughlin, “The Air Lessons of Korea,” Aviation Week , May 25, 1953; Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base (Boston: Little & Brown, 2011), 222. Drones were also used to survey nuclear testing in Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1946 that resulted in the expulsion of the local population.

[140]  See Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America (Boston: Little & Brown, 2014); Linda Hunt, Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945-1990 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991).

[141]  Paul G. Gillespie, Weapons of Choice: The Development of Precision Guided Munitions (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 45-51; “Heavyweights Over Korea: B-29 Employment in the Korean Air-War,” Air University Quarterly Review , 7, 1 (Spring 1954), 102, 103; David Anderton, “Project Typhoon Aids Missile Designers: New Electronic Computer Can Solve Problem of Entire Defense System,” Aviation Week , December 18, 1950; F. Lee Moore, “Flying a Bug Instead of a Beam,” Aviation Week , October 23, 1950, 57; Cabell Phillips, “Why We’re Not Fighting with Push Buttons,” New York Times , July 16, 1950, SM7. On Nazi scientists, see Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip .

[142]  Nick Alexandrov, “Carpet Bombing History: Washington’s Anti-Monuments Men,” June 26-28, 2015, http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/26/carpet-bombing-history/ ; Commission of International Association of Democratic Lawyers, Report on U.S. Crimes in Korea, March 31, 1952, Pyongyang, Korea, www.wwpep.org/index/Resources_files/crime.pdf.

[143]  1 st Marine Special Action Report, Wonsan-Hamburg-Chosin, October 8, 1950-December 15, 1950, U.S. National Archives, College Park Maryland, RG 127, UDO40, Korea, G-2 ,Chosin Reservoir.

[144]  “Communist Camouflage and Deception,” Air University Quarterly Review, 1, 1 (Spring 1953).

[145]  Armstrong,   “The Destruction and Reconstruction of North Korea, 1950 – 1960.”

[146] Conrad Crane, American Airpower Strategy in Korea, 1950-1953 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 40, 41, 43; Sahr Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage: Americans, Noncombatant Immunity, and Atrocity after World War II (New York: Routeledge, 2006), 149. One 60-year-old man, too sick to brush away hundreds of flies that swarmed him, told a New York Times reporter that he “wanted to die – I would rather die than live like this.”

[147] Author’s personal Interview, Korean War Pilots, Boston Commons, Peace demonstration against the Iraq War, fall 2005; Salmon, Scorched Earth, Black Snow , 407.

[148] Eg. Captain Pressly, December 27, 1950, RG 342, U.S. Air Force Command, Mission Reports of Units in Korean War, boxes 21, National Archives, College Park Maryland. In this report, Pressly reported rocketing, napalming and strafing enemy troops on a hill, with an estimated 300 troop casualties. He then reported strafing a village at CT 2416 and starting three fires. 8 rockets and four napalm. There are hundreds of reports like this in 122 boxes in RG 342.

[149]  Thompson, Cry Korea ; I.F. Stone, The Hidden History of the Korean War (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1952), 258; Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. II , 706-07.

[150]  Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man , with a new introduction by Douglas Kellner (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964, reprint 1991).

[151]  Quoted in Marilyn B. Young, “Bombing Civilians From the Twentieth to the 21 st Centuries,” in Bombing Civilians , 2009, 160.

[152]  Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol II, 705; “Attack on the Irrigation Dams in North Korea,” Air University Quarterly Review, 6 (Winter 1953-1954), 41.

[153]  Franklin, War Stars .

[154]  Quoted in Wilfred G. Burchett, Vietnam North (New York: International Publishers, 1966). The Air Force claimed that air power “executed the dominant role in the achievement of military objectives,” with the threatened devastation of North Korea’s agricultural economy forcing Kim Il-Sung to the bargaining table. Robert Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 141.

[155]  Rick Shenkman, Political Animals: How Our Stone Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 185.

[156]  “Memorandum of Discussion at the 144th Meeting of the National Security Council, Wednesday, May 13, 1953,” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954, Korea, Vol. XV, Part 1 , Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v15p1/d515.

[157]   Robert F. Kerr, Foreign Policy- Far East, Robert S. Kerr Papers, box 3, foreign policy, Carl Albert Congressional Research Center, Norman, OK.  On the formative influence of the frontier, see Walter Hixson, American Settler Colonialism: A History (New York: McMillan, 2013).

[158] Casey, Selling the Korean War , pp. 160, 162, 161.

[159]  Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media , rev ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002).

[160] “When the Red Shadow Fell, North Korea’s Liberated Capital Shows the Signs of Russian Rule,” Life Magazine , November 27, 1950, 58. A subsequent letter to the editor by a missionary who had known Mr. Ha referred to the brutality of the “red devils.”

[161]  Harold H. Martin, “How Our Air Raiders Plastered Korea,” Saturday Evening Post , August 5, 1950, 26, 27.

[162]  John Steinbeck, Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team (New York: Penguin Classics, 2009); Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Airpower: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 137.

[163]  David Lawrence, “The Kremlin’s Offensive,” U.S. News & World Report , July 7, 1950, 48.

[164]  Joseph and Stewart Alsop, “The Lessons of Korea,” Saturday Evening Post , September 2, 1950, 17.

[165]  See for example Vladislav Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War From Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

[166] Marguerite Higgins, “The Terrible Days in Korea,” Saturday Evening Post , August 19, 1950, 26.

[167] Marguerite Higgins, War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent , photograph by Carl Mydans and others (Garden City New York: Doubleday, 1951), 15, 16; Antoinette May, Witness to War: A Biography of Marguerite Higgins (New York: Beaufort Books, 1983). The prevailing gender norms of the time were reflected in a profile of Higgins in Life Magazine , which had as a caption that she “still managed to look good” despite being embedded with U.S. troops!

[168]  Quoted in Cumings, The Korean War , 14-15.

[169]  Mantell, “Opposition to the Korean War,” 25; “Warning to the West,” New York Times , June 26, 1950; Philip Knightly, The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker (London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1975), 347.  A typical article from the New York Times , September 28, 1950 “The Korean War: UN Forces Clean Up in Seoul, Drive Ahead in South,” begins triumphantly in describing that the 1 st Division raised its flag over the US consulate after cleaning out pockets of resistance, and goes on to report air support operations targeting railyards and bridges and the death of 250 “reds” in one operation and 1,900 overall. The bodies of twelve American soldiers were reported found in Chinju after being tied up and shot, with two Americans surviving after playing dead and one North Korean killed because he presumably refused to shoot the “helpless Americans.” “The Korean War: UN Forces Clean Up in Seoul: Drive Ahead in South,” New York Times , September 28, 1950, 2. While there is nothing inaccurate in this reporting, much is left out including the desolation of the city following the UN “liberation” detailed by British journalist Reginald Thompson and voices of Seoul’s people. The enemy is depicted as being brutal, though commensurate or worse atrocities committed by U.S. and ROK forces are whitewashed.

[170]  Mantell, “Opposition to the Korean War,” 85. The letter was later published in the Socialist Monthly Review which editorialized against the war. Hanley, Choe and Mendoza, The Bridge at No-Gun Ri , 162.

[171]  Walter Sullivan, “GI View of Koreans as ‘Gooks’ Believed Doing Political Damage,” New York Times , July 26, 1950.

[172] Herzstein, Henry R. Luce, Time and the American Crusade in Asia .

[173]  “Men at War,” Time Magazine , January 1, 1951, 23.

[174]  See Tom Heenan, From Traveler to Traitor: The Life of Wilfred Burchett (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006), 11, 4; Wilfred G. Burchett, ‘The Atomic Plague’, Daily Express , 6 September 1945; Jamie Miller, “The Forgotten History War: Wilfred Burchett, Australia and the Cold War in the Asia Pacific,” The Asia Pacific Journal (September 2008), 6, 1, https://apjjf.org/-Jamie-Miller/2912/article.pdf; Gavan McCormack, “Korea: Wilfred Burchett’s Thirty Years War,” in Burchett Reporting the Other Side of the World: 1939-1983 , ed. Ben Kiernan (London, Melbourne, New York: Quartet Books, 1986); Mahurin, Honest John ; and Wilfred G. Burchett, Letter to Kathy Rethlake, 15/2/1971, provided to the author by George Burchett of Hanoi, Wilfred’s son.

[175]  Noam Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” in American Power and the New Mandarins: Historical and Political Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 323-366.

[176]  Richard H. Rovere and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. The General and the President and the Future of American Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Young, 1951), 102.

[177]  Ibid., 109.

[178]  Ibid., 238.

[179]  Ibid., 250.

[180]  See Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Postwar America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007); Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Walt W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (New York: 1956); Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.”

[181]  Jacques Soustelle, “Indochina and Korea: One Front.” Foreign Affairs , 29, 1 (October 1950): 56-66.

[182]  Henry A. Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy , foreword by Gordon Dean, published for the Council on Foreign Relations (New York: Harper Brothers, 1957), 43, 47, 49.

[183] C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War III (New York: Ballantine Books, 1958, 1960), 95.

[184] See Chomsky, For Reasons of State ; and William O. Douglas “We Can’t Save Asia by War Alone,”  Look Magazine , January 16, 1951.

[185]  Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century , 470-476. Lippmann’s views on the Chinese revolution, which he was hostile to but felt the U.S. could do nothing to halt, are discussed in Peck, Washington’s China, 78.

[186] Mark Philip Bradley and Mary L. Dudziak, eds.,  Making the Forever War: Marilyn B. Young on the Culture and Politics of American Militarism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2021), 70-75.  On corporate support for McCarthyism, see Michael Paul Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 1969).

[187]  Jo Ann Ooiman Robinson, Abraham Went Out: A Biography of A.J. Muste (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 139, 283. See also, A.J. Muste, “Korea: Spark to Set a World on Fire,” in The Essays of A.J. Muste , ed. Nat Hentoff (New York: The Bobbs-Merill Company, 1967), 331-352.

[188]  Scott Bennett, “Conscience, Comrades, & the Cold War: The Korean War Draft Resistance Cases of Socialist Pacifists David McReynolds and Vern Davidson,” Peace & Change 38 (January 2013): 83-120.  The ranks of conscientious objectors included Gordon Carey of Grand Rapids, Michigan, the son of a pacifist minister who was sentenced to three years in prison.  Later, Carey became a Freedom Rider and participated in the sit-in movement that protested Jim Crow segregation in the South.  Katherine Q. Seelye, “Gordon Carey, 89, Unsung Catalyst in the Civil Rights Movement, Dies,” The New York Times , December 30, 2021, B11.

[189]  Mantell, “Opposition to the Korean War;” Andrew Hunt, David Dellinger: The Life and Times of a Nonviolent Revolutionary (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 97; and Frederick C. Giffin, Six Who Protested: Radical Opposition to the First World War (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1977), 11.

[190]  Mantell, “Opposition to the Korean War,” 87.

[191]  “Communists: A Moral Certainty,” Time Magazine , August 14, 1950, 11.

[192]  For a good discussion, see Myra MacPherson, ‘ All Governments Lie:’ The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone (New York: Scribner, 2006).

[193]  McAuliffe, Crisis on the Left, 75; and Bennett, “Conscience, Comrades, & the Cold War,” 85, 109.  The Socialist Party under Norman Thomas offered critical support for the war, producing a press release on June 29, 1950, “Socialists Support Security Council, President Truman, On Korea,” cited in the latter.  For reference on the debate among socialists regarding the war, see Susan Green, “Archive: The Left and Korea” (first published as ‘Summing up the discussion on the Korean Statement,’ in Forum , the internal bulletin of the Independent Socialist League, in 1950), https://www.dissentmagazine.org/wp-content/files_mf/1390330097d5Green.pdf.  

[194] “Korean War Lullaby,” http://www.trussel.com/hf/korean.htm.

[195]  I.F. Stone, The Hidden History of the Korean War (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1953); MacPherson, ‘ All Governments Lie,’ 264-267.

[196]   Against the Beast: A Documentary History of American Opposition to Empire , ed. John Nichols (New York: Nation Books, 2004), 231; Paul Robeson “Denounce the Korean Intervention,” June 28, 1950 in If We Must Die: African American Voices on War and Peace , ed. Kristen L. Stanford (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 191-192.

[197]  Scott Nearing, World Events , Winter 1950, Volume III; Winter 1951, Volume IV, Harry S. Truman Library, James B. Moullette Papers, Independence, Missouri, Box 2, folder pamphlets.

[198] Mills, The Causes of World War III , 88, 89.

[199]  Ivan M. Tribe, “Purple Hearts, Heartbreak Ridge, and Korean Mud: Pain, Patriotism and Faith in the 1950-1953 ‘Police Action’” in Country Music Goes to War , ed. Charles K. Wolfe and James E. Akenson (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), 128, 130.Earl Nunn’s tribute to MacArthur was also a big seller, ending with the line: “though he did the best he could, there were some who thought he should, let the communists take over all creation.”

[200]  Woody Guthrie, “Mr. Sickyman Ree,” “Han River Woman,” “Korean Bad Weather,” “Korean Quicksands,” and “Korean War Tank,” excerpted. Words & Music by Woody Guthrie.  © Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Woody Guthrie Archive, Tulsa, Oklahoma.  I thank Nora Guthrie and the Woody Guthrie archives for allowing publication of the material.

[201] Woody Guthrie, “Talking Korea Blues,” excerpted. Words & Music by Woody Guthrie.  © Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Woody Guthrie Archive, Tulsa, Oklahoma.  Woody Guthrie Archive, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

[202]  Robert O. Bowen, “A Matter of Price,” in Retrieving Bones: Stories and Poems of the Korean War , ed. W.D. Ehrhart and Philip K. Jason (New Bruinswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 143.

[203]  James Drought, “The Secret” In Retrieving Bones , 156-157.

[204]  Drought, “The Secret,” in Retrieving Bones, 146-147.

[205]  Melinda Pash, In the Shadow of the Greatest Generation: The Americans Who Fought in the Korean War (New York: NYU Press, 2012), 173; Richard J.H. Johnston, “Outnumbered GIs Lost Faith in Arms: Morale Hard Hit as the Enemy, Disregarded his Losses, Retained the Initiative,” New York Times , December 10, 1950, 5; Martin Russ, The Last Parallel: A Marine’s War Journal (New York: Rhinehart, 1957); Curtis James Morrow, What’s a Commie Ever Done to Black People? A Korean War Memoir of Fighting in the US Army’s Last All Negro Unit (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1977). One symptom of low morale was the smoking of opium. The Pentagon reported that 715 soldiers were arrested for this purpose in 1952. Kathleen Frydl, The Drug Wars in America, 1940-1973 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 82 and Lukasz Kamienski, Shooting Up: A Short History of Drugs and War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 147.

[206]  Johnnie letter to Dad, January 16, 1951, Papers of John B. Moullette, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence, Missouri, Box 1.

[207]  Dean Acheson, response letter to Mr. Moullette, February 23, 1951, Papers of John B. Moullette, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri, Box 1.

[208]  John B. Moullette, State Teachers College Trenton, New Jersey, letter to Mr. George E. Sokosky, Columnist, c/o Times-Picayune, New Orleans, Louisiana. Moullette went on to successful career in the field of education and his father proudly boasted of his accomplishments in a letter to Dean Acheson in 1969.

[209] Moullette to Moullette, January 16, 1951; Moullette to Acheson, January 18, 1951; Acheson to Moullette, February 23, 1951; all in Acheson correspondence folder, box I, Moullette Papers, HSTL; Casey, Selling the Korean War , 224.

[210]  Kim, The Unending Korean War ; Kim Dong-choon, “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Korea:  Uncovering the Hidden Korean War,” The Asia-Pacific Journal , 9-5-10, March 1, 2010. – See more at: http://apjjf.org/-Kim-Dong-choon/3314/article.html#sthash.b8988fKP.dpuf.

[211]  Kim, The Unending Korean War , 157; Cumings, The Korean War , 202; Bellesiles, A People’s History of the United States Military , 261; Sung Yong Park, “Report on U.S. War Crimes in Korea, 1945-2001,” Korea International War Crimes Tribunal, June 23, 2001; “Truth Commission: South Korea 2005,” United States Institute for Peace, http://www.usip.org/publications/truth-commission-south-korea-2005; and Choe Sang-hun, “Unearthing War’s Horrors years Later in South Korea, International New York Times, Dec. 3, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/world/asia/03korea.html.

[212]  Charles J. Hanley, and Jae-Soon Chang, “Summer of Terror: At least 100,000 said executed  by Korean ally of US in 1950,” Japan Focus, July 23, 2008, 2.Available online at  http://japanfocus.org/-__J__Hanley___J_S__Chang/2827.

[213] James Cameron, Point of Departure (London: Oriel Press, 1978), 131-2; McDonald, Korea , 42;  also Nichols, How Many Times Can I Die?, 128. CIC agent Donald Nichol, a confidante of  Rhee, said he stood by helplessly in Suwan as “the condemned were hastily pushed into line  along the edge of the newly opened grave. They were quickly shot in the head and pushed in the  grave…I tried to stop this from happening, however, I gave up when I saw I was wasting my  time.”

[214] Kim, The Unending Korean War , 159, 160, 201-2; Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War , II, 265.

[215] Bruce Cumings, “The South Korean Massacre at Taejon: New Evidence on US Responsibility and Cover-up,” The Asia-Pacific Journal , Vol. 6, Issue 7 (July 2, 2008), http://apjjf.org/-Bruce-Cumings/2826/article.html.

[216]  Hanley, Choe, and Mendoza, The Bridge at No Gun Ri , 98.

[217] Colonel Claudius O. Wolfe, JAGC, Zone Staff Judge Advocate, Jack R. Todd, Major, JAGC, Chief War Crimes Division, Historical Report for Period Ending 31 December 1952, RG 554, Records of the General headquarters, Korean Communications Zone, War Crimes Historical Files, box 220, National Archives, College Park Maryland. Once they reached Pyongyang, the U.S. POWs, many of them emaciated, were paraded in the main city street.

[218]  Kim, The Unending Korean War , 171; Investigation Conducted by Eugene Wolf and Lt. Col Leon W. Konecki, 26-29 December 1950 with Deputy Chief of Staff Headquarters RG 554, Records of the General Headquarters, Far East Command, Reports of Investigations, 1950-1951, box 16; 24 th Infantry War Diary, RG 338, Records of the U.S. Army, Operations, 25 th Infantry Division, September 1950-31 October 1950, box 3481, National Archives, College Park Maryland.

[219] Cuming and Halliday, Korea’s Unknown War .

[220] Captain Pressly, December 30, 1950, RG 342, U.S. Air Force Command, Mission Reports of Units in Korean War, box 21, National Archives, College Park Maryland.

[221]  Cumings, Origins of the Korean War II, 686, 707; Marilyn B. Young , “Hard Sell, ” in Selling War in a Media Age: The Presidency and Public Opinion in a Media Age ed. Kenneth Osgood and Andrew Frank (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), 129.

[222] Commission of International Association of Democratic Lawyers, Report on U.S. Crimes in Korea, March 31, 1952, Pyongyang, Korea, www.wwpep.org/index/Resources_files/crime.pdf . In one brutal revenge killing in Sinchon, American soldiers cut off a woman’s breasts and put a wooden club in her vagina before burning her alive in an act reminiscent of atrocities described in Vietnam’s Winter Soldiers investigation. See Winter Soldier (International Newsreel, 1971).

[223]  Kim, The Unending Korean War , 157; McCormack and Lone, Korea Since 1850 , 150; Cumings, Origins of the Korean War II , 751. North Korean atrocities are detailed in Historical Report for Period Ending 31 December 1952, War Crimes Division, Col. Claudius O. Wolfe, Zone Staff Judge Advocate and Major Jack R. Todd, JAGC, RG 554, Records of the General Headquarters, Korea Communications Zone, War Crimes Historical Files, War Crimes, box 20 which includes vivid photographs.

[224] See Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe, and Mendoza, The Bridge at No Gun Ri, 134; Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage , 96-102. In January 1951, the U.S. military command investigated a company of American military police with the motorcycle squad who had fired their weapons indiscriminately from a train. Angry about their buddies being killed, the squadron shot at seven women and children, killed a fourteen year old boy and man carrying a bundle of clothes up a mountain, and injured a railroad signal man. When a transport officer and his aide asked them to stop shooting, the ringleader replied that it was “none of their business” and that “if they were, or liked ‘commies’ they should go north.” Report of Investigation Concerning Alleged Malicious Use of Weapons by Members of X Corps, January 10, 1951; Chief KMAG to Chief of Staff, November 15, 1950, Richard W. Weaver, Assistant Corps Inspector General, RG 554, Records General Headquarters Far East Command, Reports of Investigation 1950-1951, box 17, National Archives, College Park Maryland.

[225]  Choon, “Forgotten War, Forgotten Massacres – The Korean War (1950-1953) as Licensed Mass Killing,” Hanley, Sung-Hun Choe and Mendoza, The Bridge at No Gun Ri .

[226]  Salmon, Scorched Earth, Black Snow , 277. Australian soldiers also executed prisoners in cold blood.

[227]  Cumings, The Korean War ; Robert Jay Lifton, Home From the War: Vietnam Veterans Neither Victims Nor Executioners (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973); Aaron B. O’Connell, Underdogs: The Making of the Modern Marine Corps (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 192. O’Connell in a book published by Harvard University Press no less, lays out the brutalizing effect of boot camp training but then extols the Marines professionalism in Korea, saying that excessive violence and aggressive behavior was linked more to home-front problems like high rates of domestic violence and murder. The latter is no doubt true but one wonders if he or his editors have ever read the key literature on the war.

[228]  Martin Russ, Happy Hunting Ground (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 73.

[229]  Kahn Jr. The Peculiar War , 131.

[230]  Henry Beston, “Soliloquy On the Airplane,” Human Events , 7, 42 (October 18, 1950), 1-4.

[231]  Kamienski, Shooting Up , 155, 156.

[232] Tim Weiner, “Remember Brainwashing,” International New York Times , July 6, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/weekinreview/06weiner.html?_r=1. See Annie Jacobson, The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top Secret Military Research Agency (Boston: Little & Brown, 2015) and KAMIEŃSKI, Shooting Up , 155, 156. Edward Hunter, Brainwashing in Red China (New York: Vanguard, 1951).

[233] Historical Report for Period Ending 31 December 1952, War Crimes Division, Col. Claudius O. Wolfe, Zone Staff Judge Advocate and Major Jack R. Todd, JAGC, RG 554, Records of the General Headquarters, Korea Communications Zone, War Crimes Historical Files, War Crimes, box 20, National Archives, College Park Maryland; American POW’s in Korea: Sixteen Personal Accounts (North Carolina: McFarland, 1998); Gavan McCormack, “Korea,” in Burchett: Reporting the Other Side of the World , 1939-1983, ed. Ben Kiernan (London: Quartet Books, 1987), 168; William Shadish, with Lewis Carlson, When Hell Froze Over: The Memoir of a Korean War Combat Physician Who Spent 1010 Days in a Communist Prison Camp (New York: I Universe, 2007).

[234] Interview with Robert Olaf Erricker, 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars, Great Britain, 1950; interview with Edward George Beckerley, British Imperial War Museum, historical archive.  Erricker came to the belief that the Chinese and North Koreans were “infinitely better off under communism than under [the previous] feudal system.”  Clarence Adams, An American Dream: The Life of an African American Soldier and POW Who Spent Twelve Years in Communist China (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007); “Briton Swaps Sides,” The Sydney Morning Herald , September 9, 1962, https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1301&dat=19620909&id=1VoVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=EeYDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3463,2775376&hl=en; Bellesiles, A People’s History of the United States Military , 273; Pash, In the Shadow of the Greatest Generation .

[235]  Young, Name, Rank and Serial Number , 32; Richard Peters and Xiaobing Li, Voices From the Korean War: Personal Stories of American, Korean and Chinese Soldiers (The University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 246-247; Callum A, MacDonald, “’Heroes Behind Barbed Wire’ – The United States, Britain and the POW Issue During the Korean War,” in The Korean War in History , ed. Cotton and Neary, 153; Bertil Lintner, Blood Brothers: The Criminal Underworld of Asia (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2002), 248; Cumings, Origins of the Korean War II , 202.

[236] Report of Investigation into Allegations Contained in Letter to International Red Cross from the Two Senior POWs per July 28 to August 11, 1951, RG 554, General Headquarters, Far East Command, Office of the Inspector General, Box 18, National Archives, College Park Maryland; Lee Hak Ku and Hong Chol, Sr. Prisoner Camp, Pusan to International Red Cross, June 8, 1951 Ibid; From Results of Trial. Richard R. Anderson, June 21, 1951; From the Results of the Trial, Isaac V. Davis, 25 June 1951.

[237] Report of Investigation into Allegations Contained in Letter to International Red Cross from the Two Senior POWs per July 28 to August 11, 1951, RG 554, General Headquarters, Far East Command, Office of the Inspector General, National Archives, College Park Maryland, Box 18

[238]  Young, Name, Rank and Serial Number , 40; Peter Kalischer, “The Koje Snafu,” Colliers , September 6, 1952, 15-19; Melady, Korea , 157; Wilfred Burchett and Alan Winnington, Koje Unscreened   (Peking, 1953). One American MP was killed in the melee either from a spear wounded inflicted by a rebellious prisoner or by his own concussion grenade according to conflicting accounts.  Survivors later smuggled a letter signed by 6,223 prisoners to the media.  It said, “Not a day, not a night but the sacrifice of some of our comrades occurs.  The American guards, armed to the teeth, are repeatedly committing acts of violence and barbarity against our comrades.  They drag them out and kill them either in public or in secret with machine-guns and carbines.  They drive our comrades by the thousand into… torture rooms.  Many patriots are loaded into iron barred cages of police cars and taken to the seashore where they are shot and their corpses cast into the sea.”

[239]  Burchett and Winnington, Koje Unscreened , 121-125; Sandler, The Korean War , 215. Reference for incidents at the POW camp at Pong-am do: Col. Claudius O. Wolfe, UN Zone Staff Judge Advocate and Major Donald C. Young to Commander General, “Review of Report of Proceedings of a Board of Officers Appointed Pursuant to Article 121 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of POWs, August 12, 1949,” National Archives, College Park, MD, RG 338, Records of the U.S. Army Commands, 1942-, “Korean Communist Zone, 1951-1952,” Box 509. On March 7, 1953, POWs on the island of Yonchondo mounted another rebellion which was put down at a cost of 27 POWs killed and 60 wounded.

[240] Monica Kim, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 357.  Of the North Korean prisoners who returned to North Korea, many had been physically intimidated and branded with anticommunist tattoos while in South Korean prisons, which made it impossible for them to return to their communities.  According to prisoners interviewed by journalists Wilfred G. Burchett and Alan Winnington, sadistic guards would slash those who said they wanted to go home with a dagger, rub ground pepper in the wound, and then ask: “Do you still want to go back to the communists?” Others who resisted “voluntary” repatriation could be sent to a compound known as the “graveyard,” where they were scalded with hot water, beaten, had flesh and arms cut off, or were shot or hung on gibbets.  See Wilfred G. Burchett and Alan Winnington, Koje Unscreened (British-China Friendship Association, 1952), available at www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/koje.pdf; and Burchett, This Monstrous War , 202, 203.

[241]  See Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea (Indiana University Press, 1989); “ United States Biological Warfare During the Korean War: Rhetoric and Reality ;” Tom Buchanen, “The Courage of Galileo: Joseph Needham and the Germ Warfare Allegations in the Korean War,” The Historical Association , 2011, http://www.csupomona.edu/~zywang/needham.pdf ; Lone and McCormack, Korea Since 1850 , 115-18; Diarmuid Jeffreys, “Dirty Little Secrets: Al Jazeera Investigates the Claim that the US Used Germ Warfare During the Korean War,” Al Jazeera , April 4, 2010; Jacobsen, The Pentagon’s Brain . Needham was red-baited and barred from travel to the U.S. until the 1970s.  See also, Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist: The Autobiography of Wilfred Burchett , ed. George Burchett and Nick Shimmin (Australia: University of New South Wales Press, 2005), 403, 406.  Burchett interviewed peasants in Chukdong on the border of the neutral zone who discovered clumps of flies and mosquitoes that were unnatural to the area and found mosquitoes when the area was still under heavy snow. Burchett also claimed to have seen flies that were identified by Chinese laboratories as belonging to the hylemia species infected with anthrax while traveling to POW camps near the Yalu River, and said that one was accidentally swallowed by a black GI whose symptoms he later recognized to have resembled descriptions in a Ft. Detrick study cited by Seymour Hersh in his book, Chemical and Biological Warfare .

[242]  Historian Sheila Miyoshi Jager claims Needham relied too heavily on Chinese scientists intimidated by the repression that existed under Mao, and that Soviet documents reveal a cover-up in which the Chinese created false plague regions and injected persons sentenced to execution with the plague bacilli. (Jager, Brothers at War , 256).  Endicott and Hagerman produced Chinese archival documents which show that Mao and his subordinates ordered investigation and debated the scale of the operations which they would not have done if it was all a hoax.  The incriminating Soviet documents may have been fabricated as part of an effort by secret Police Chief Lavrenti Beria to discredit rivals.   They have never actually been seen by Western scholars who rely on the word of a journalist working for a Japanese newspaper that has sought to deny Japanese atrocities in World War II and is bitterly anticommunist.  See Endicott and Hagerman, “Twelve Newly Released Soviet-era Documents and Allegations of U. S. germ warfare during the Korean War,” H-Diplo , July 5, 1999.  Jager misleads her readers by confidently concluding it was all hoax when she does not cite or weigh the evidence presented by Endicott and Hagerman or discuss the findings of Al Jazeera’s investigation.  She also dismisses knowledge of CIA psy-war operations and fact that the U.S. was later accused of germ warfare by Cuba and Vietnam, with some substance it appears.

[243]  Jeffrey A. Lockwood, Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as a Weapon of War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 126, 172.  Lockwood provides an informative discussion of the controversy far better than Jager, with excellent historical background on Ishii and his rescue by the United States after World War II.  Dave Chaddock, This Must be the Place: How the U.S. Waged Germ Warfare in the Korean War and Denied it Ever Since (Seattle: Bennett & Hastings Publishing, 2013).

[244]  Endicott and Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare ; Julian Royall, “Did the US Wage Germ Warfare in Korea?” The Telegraph , June 10, 2010. Years after issuing his report, Joseph Needham said he was “97 percent convinced the charges were true.” Hugh Deane, The Korean War, 1945-1953 (San Francisco: China Book, 1999), 155.

[245]  Blaine Harden, King of Spies: The Dark Reign of America’s Spymaster in Korea (New York: Viking, 2017), 8. See also, Blaine Harden, “How One Man Helped Burn Down North Korea,” Politico Magazine , October 2, 2017, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/02/donald-nichols-book-north-korea-215665.

[246]  Harden, King of Spies , 32, 35.

[247]  Roy Appleman, South to the Naktong, North to the Yalu (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 1992).

[248]  Harden, King of Spies , 9.

[249]  Burchett and Winnington, Koje Unscreened , www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/koje.pdf; Young, Name, Rank and Serial Number , 42; Haas, In the Devil’s Shadow , 55, 56.

[250]  Harden, King of Spies , 108.

[251]  Harden, King of Spies , 165. In Vietnam, CIA agent Anthony Poe was considered the real life Kurtz as he promoted brutal methods, including bounties for enemy ears and heads while training Montagnards and helping to run the CIAs Hmong army in Laos.

[252]  Harden, King of Spies , 9.

[253]  Halberstam, The Coldest Winter, 547; Private Jesse Ibarra, Interview by Colonel Jesse H. Bishop, 25 June 1951 in Report of Investigation RE Alleged Irregularities in the Administration of Military Justice in the 25 th Infantry Division, 28 December 1950 to 8 March, 1951, RG 554, Records General Headquarters, Far East Command, Reports of Investigation 1950-1951, box 9, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.

[254]  “Jim Crow Justice in Korea: The Case of Lt. Leon Gilbert,” Trade Union Youth Committee for the Freedom of Lt. Gilbert, New York; American Left Ephemera Collection, 1894-2008, University of Pittsburgh Archive, http://digital.library.pitt.edu/u/ulsmanuscripts/pdf/31735060483041.pdf; and Clarence Adams, An American Dream: The Life of an African American Soldier and POW Who Spent Twelve Years in Communist China , edited by Della Adams and Lewis H. Carlson (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), pp. 34-37. Adams stayed in China for twelve years after being well treated in captivity. After witnessing napalm bombs hit a Korean hut and kill a woman and her baby, he came to the realization “we should not be here in Korea.”

[255]  Report of Investigation RE Alleged Irregularities in the Administration of Military Justice in the 25 th Infantry Division, 28 December 1950 to 8 March, 1951, RG 554, Records General Headquarters, Far East Command, Reports of Investigation 1950-1951, box 9, National Archives, College Park Maryland.

[256] Cited in Swomley Jr.,  The Military Establishment , 232.

[257]  Bercuson, Blood on the Hills , 97, 31, 32.  On Canadian involvement, see also Melady, Korea.

[258]  Bercuson , Blood on the Hills , 84.  For a critical view of Pearson, see Yves Engler, Lester Pearson’s Peacekeeping: The Truth May Hurt (Vancouver: Fenwood Publishing, 2012).

[259]  Stephen L. Endicott, James G. Endicott: Rebel Out of China (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 302, 283, 291.  James Endicott was born to a missionary family in China and came to empathize with the Chinese revolution and developed socialist views based on his experiences during China’s civil war. Friendly with Zhou Enlai, the RCMP forged documents linking him to the Canadian Communist Party which were false.

[260]  Salmon, Scorched Earth, Black Snow , 44, 87, 198.

[261]  Salmon, Scorched Earth, Black Snow , 122-23.  Corporal Peet mentioned another soldier who when he removed the cigarette he was smoking, had the flesh of his lips come away with it.

[262] Ian Irvine, “George Blake: I Spy a British Traitor,” The Independent , October 1, 2006.  Blake had served with the Dutch section of MI-6 during World War II.  While working as a double agent after the Korean War, he allegedly betrayed the identity of 40 MI-6 agents, helped uncover a CIA mole in the Russian intelligence directorate (Popov who was executed in 1960) and revealed to the KGB Operation Gold in which the US and British spy services built a tunnel into East Berlin which was used to tap telephone lines used by the Soviet military.  Blake escaped from prison in 1966 and went on to live for the next half century in Moscow where he was feted as a national hero.  He told reporter Ian Irvine in 2006 that he had no regrets:  “The Communist ideal is too high to achieve … and there can only be nominal adherents to it in the end.  But I am optimistic, that in time, and it may take thousands of years, that humanity will come to the viewpoint that it would be better to live in a Communist society where people were really equal.”  See George Blake, No Other Choice (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990).

[263]  Mantell,” Opposition to the Korean War,” 66; James Van Fleet, “The Truth About Korea,” The Readers Digest , July 1953, 1; Braim, The Will to Win , 328. See for example, Mr. D.A. Greenhill, U. Alexis Johnson and Kenneth T. Young, “Korean Internal Situation: The So Minh Case,” July 2, 1952; “Korean Internal Political Situation,” June 21, 1952, Harry S. Truman Papers, Korea, HST Library, Box 11; Suh Sung, Unbroken Spirits: Twenty-Five Years in South Korea’s Gulag (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001).

[264]  Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression.

[265]  Katsiaficas, Asia’s Unknown Uprisings ; Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression .

[266]  Cumings, North Korea ; Armstrong, Tyranny of the Weak ; Balasz Szalontai, Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era: Soviet-DPRK Relations and the Roots of North Korean Despotism, 1953-1964 (Woodrow Wilson Center for International History, 2005), 40; Benjamin R. Young, “ Juche in the United States: The Black Panther Party’s Relations with North Korea, 1969-1971,” The Asia-Pacific Journal , Vol. 13, Issue 12, No. 2, March 30, 2015. In 1964, Cambridge economist Joan Robinson wrote a report entitled “Korean miracle” praising the “intense concentration of the Koreans on national pride” in North Korea’s social and economic development, led by the country’s leader Kim Il Sung who was a “messiah rather than a dictator.” Kim enjoyed prestige within non-aligned circles, promoting North Korea as a vanguard state in resisting integration into the global capitalist economy and in forging its political independence, training two thousand guerrilla fighters from 25 countries and providing significant development aid. Noam Chomsky has noted that capitalist encirclement is sure to bring about the most autocratic qualities in socialist regimes.

[267]  For excellent analysis, see Cumings, North Korea .

[268]  Kwon& Ho-Chung, North Korea , 106; Chris Springer, Pyongyang: The Hidden History of the North Korean Capital (Gold River, CA: Saranda Books, 2003). This is similar to Vietnam where most war commemoration honors revolutionary heroes, rather than war victims and dead.

[269]  See Larry J. Butler, Copper Empire: Mining and the Colonial State in Northern Rhodesia, c. 1930-1964 (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2007). The Paley commission in 1951 constructed a national policy on resources and suggested that the U.S. should look to Latin America and Africa. The American government provided loans to the Central African Federation, headed by white supremacist Roy Welensky, to increase copper production. On the general drive for resources as a feature of U.S. foreign policy, see Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969).

[270] Cumings, The Korean War , 217; Laton McCartney, Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988); Roger Hilsman to Mr. Johnson, “Requirements for Petroleum Agreement,” January 3, 1964, RG 59, General Records Department of State, Office of Legal Affairs, Far Eastern Affairs, box 2, folder petroleum, National Archives, College Park Maryland; and Colby, DuPont Dynasty, 409.

[271]   Democracy in Occupied Japan: The U.S. Occupation and Japanese Politics and Society , ed. Mark Caprio and Yoneyuki Sugita (New York: Routledge, 2007), 17; Roger Dingeman, “The Dagger and the Gift: The Impact of the Korean War on Japan,” Journal of American-East Asia Relations (Spring 1993), 42.

[272]  Bruce Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 340-41; A.H. Raskin, “U.S. Arms Being Produced at 7 Times Pre-Korean Rate,” New York Times , June 25, 1952; “Production Step-Up Faces Rocky Road,” Aviation Week , January 8, 1951

[273]  “McDonnell Backlog Climbs Steeply,” Aviation Week , October 16, 1950; “Missiles Super-Agency Fast Taking Shape,” Aviation Week , October 30, 1950; “Industry Poised for All-Out Mobilization,” Aviation Week, December 11, 1950, 13-14; Irving Stone, “New High Thrust Turbojet Seen for GE,” Aviation Week , December 4, 1950; Philip Klass, “Hughes Takes Wraps Off Avionics Giant: Fir is Major Producer of Air Defense Weapons,” Aviation Week , May 25, 1953, 14, 15; William D. Hartung, Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex (New York: The Nation Books, 2011); Charles Higham, Howard Hughes: The Secret Life (New York: St. Martin’s 1993); Kai Frderickson, Cold War Dixie: Militarization and Modernization in the American South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013); David L. Carlton, “The American South and the U.S. Defense Economy: A Historical View,” in The South, The Nation, and the World: Perspectives on Southern Economic Development , ed. David Carlton and Peter A. Coclanis (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 160. A large Douglas Aircraft plant in Tulsa, Oklahoma was among those to reopen and prosper in the war years.

[274]  Mantell, “Opposition to the Korean War,” 199.

[275]  Noam Chomsky, “The Threat of Warships on an Island of World Peace,” in Making the Future: Occupation, Intervention, Empire and Resistance (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2012), 297-300; Michael T. Klare, The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources (New York: Picador, 2012); Joseph P. Gerson, “Countering Washington’s Pivot and the New Asia-Pacific Arms Race,” Z Magazine , February 2013.

[276]  The White House, “Remarks by the President at 60th Anniversary of the Korean War Armistice,” July 27, 2013.

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The Korean War: Everything You Need to Know

The Korean War was the first time the United States military engaged in a shooting conflict after the end of World War II; it was also the first of many sparks that really turned the Cold War hot.

From 1950 to 1953, the Korean War was at the forefront of American minds and politics. A public emerging from the World War II years and weary of fighting didn't fully understand the threat of Communism or the Truman administration's "containment" strategy -- which meant they didn't fully understand what happened in the first place.

Initially, the war was popular because the threat of Communism had loomed over the U.S. and her allies since the end of World War II. It was popular for the United States to take action against it. As the war ground on, however, all the American public knew was that it certainly didn't end the way it wanted it to.

What Happened in the Korean War?

On June 25, 1950 -- 70 years ago -- North Korean tanks rolled across the 38th parallel and over the South Korean defenders of that border. It was not the heavily defended, ironically named "demilitarized zone" as we know it today. The early days of the Korean War were easy for the Communist North Koreans.

With indirect support from Communist China and the Soviet Union, 75,000 Communist troops overran the pro-Western South. Republic of Korea (ROK) defenders had no tanks, artillery or heavy weapons to defend the position. Within five days, the South Koreans had lost 73,000 troops, and the capital of Seoul had fallen to the Communists.

As soon as the United States received confirmation that the Soviet Union would not intercede directly on North Korea's behalf, President Harry Truman ordered American land and naval forces to come to South Korea's aid. U.S. forces in Japan were quickly shuttled to the Korean Peninsula to prop up the resistance to the North Korean advance.

Even the American reinforcements were overrun by the Communists due to a general lack of weapons, equipment and supplies needed to fight a war -- especially in the blazing Korean summer. The Communist assault wasn't blunted until August, when the Americans established a line around a small section of the peninsula, centered on the city of Pusan (now Busan).

With Chinese supplies and Soviet support, North Korea looked ready to push the defenders into the sea. But time was not on the Communists' side. The United Nations passed U.N. Resolution 83, which called for military aid to South Korea to push North Korea back to the 38th parallel. Reinforcements from the mainland United States would arrive by September.

Meanwhile, air forces from the newborn U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy wreaked havoc on North Korean infrastructure and transportation capabilities. When the U.S. reinforcements arrived, the Communists found themselves outnumbered.

In September 1950, Gen. Douglas MacArthur led an amphibious assault at Inchon with U.S. Marines and soldiers and ROK troops. The rope-a-dope was complete. American troops flooded into the peninsula behind the lines on Sept. 15, and the U.S. 8th Army broke out of the Pusan Perimeter on the very next day.

Against all advice from China and the USSR, North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung (grandfather to today's leader, Kim Jong-Un), did not redeploy to meet the Inchon Landing or to defend Seoul. Nine days later, Seoul was recaptured, and the road to North Korea's capital at Pyongyang was wide open. The North Korean People's Army (KPA) was rapidly disintegrating. On Oct. 1, 1950, U.N. forces invaded North Korea.

China had been ready to intervene in the war from the outset, if it deemed it necessary. Knowing the Americans would advance north of the 38th parallel, it massed troops along the border with North Korea. In October, the Chinese People's Volunteer Army (PVA) silently moved across the border. When the U.N. troops reached the Yalu River, China made its move.

The Chinese first encountered the Americans in November 1950. They routed the 8th Cavalry Division and forced its retreat before disappearing into the mountains. The attack was so fast and their disappearance so sudden that the U.N. command didn't even believe the Chinese intervention actually happened. Two weeks later, the war began in earnest.

On Nov. 13, 1950, the PVA forced the 8th Army to begin a retreat out of North Korea. The U.S. X Corps was surprised and encircled at the Chosin Reservoir two weeks later. The U.N. forces, Korean refugees and all the supplies and materiel began to flood back down the peninsula, by land or by sea. Kim Il-Sung was relieved of any control of the war by the Chinese. Truman would fire MacArthur for expanding the war.

For the rest of the war, roughly two more years, the conflict turned into a bloody stalemate, with the front line hovering around the 38th parallel, where it is today.

Why Was There a Korean War?

At the end of World War II, the Korean Peninsula was occupied in the North by the forces of the Soviet Union and in the South by the Americans, split at the 38th parallel. Ever since the two sides established their preferred government in these areas, the Korean Peninsula clamored for reunification -- under its own government, of course.

The North under Kim Il-Sung was ready to take the country by force from the outset, but was always restrained by Joseph Stalin in Moscow, who believed such a move could spark a third world war with the West -- something he feared.

After the KGB turned an American code clerk in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, they discovered that much of the American military power in the area had been moved to Japan. Believing the Americans would not move to defend Korea, the Soviets gave Kim Il-Sung the go-ahead.

But Truman believed the invasion was a challenge to the free world and the United States in particular. He believed it was necessary for the free nations of the world to contain the spread of Communism -- that if the U.S. and the West allowed one country to fall to Communism, the rest of the nations in the region would fall one by one, or the "Domino Theory."

Who Won the Korean War?

By Christmas 1950, the Korean War ground to a stalemate at the 38th parallel, the place where it started and where the border is today. The war went on for two more years, but Truman opted not to run for another term as president of the United States and the Democratic Party lost ground in the 1952 elections. Dwight Eisenhower and the Republicans won the presidency, despite the war's initial popularity. Republicans also gained control of the House and Senate.

The United States dropped more ordnance on North Korea in three years of fighting than it did on the entire Pacific Theater of World War II. The United States lost upward of 37,000 troops and suffered 102,000 wounded, according to the Korean War Project. The locals fared far worse -- some 4 million Korean and Chinese (mostly civilians) were killed, wounded or missing.

The governments in North and South Korea never changed, even if Kim Il-Sung was forced to cede control of the Korean People's Army to China, and President (and de facto dictator) Syngman Rhee's South Korea wasn't really that "free" to begin with. After a while, the only sticking point between the countries centered on returning captured Chinese and North Korean prisoners who didn't want to go home.

How Did the Korean War End?

The fighting finally ended on July 27, 1953, after two years of negotiations. Seoul had switched hands four times. Newly elected President Dwight D. Eisenhower (formerly general and supreme allied commander during WWII) went to Korea to find out for himself how to end it. Indian General K.S. Thimayya laid out a solution to the problem of prisoners of war, one both sides accepted.

The shooting stopped that day, but the war never did.

The Korean Armistice Agreement was signed by the United Nations, Korean People's Army and Chinese People's Volunteer Army, but Rhee's government refused to sign. It is an armistice and not a peace treaty, which means the war is technically ongoing, though fighting has ceased.

Today, North Korea claims it won the Korean War, which it calls the "Fatherland Liberation War," and blames the United States for starting it in the first place. The armistice established the demilitarized zone (DMZ) as we know it today, where American and South Korean soldiers stare down North Korean soldiers every day.

The Korean War, sandwiched between the romanticism of World War II and America's traumatic experience in Vietnam, is often forgotten among the conflicts of the 20th century, so much so that it's often referred to as "The Forgotten War."

According to the Department of Veterans Affairs , 1.16 million Korean War veterans are alive today. So if you see one, tell them everything you learned about their war. They will appreciate your taking the time to remember.

-- Blake Stilwell can be reached at [email protected] . He can also be found on Twitter @blakestilwell or on Facebook .

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Revolution, division, and partisan warfare, 1945–50

• South to Pusan
• North to the Yalu
• Back to the 38th parallel
• To the negotiating table
• Battling for position
• Battling over POWs
• Guerrilla warfare
• Air warfare
• Strengthening the ROK
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Why did the Korean War start?

How was the united states involved in the korean war, how were china and the soviet union involved in the korean war, was the korean war technically a war, how did the korean war end.

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After defeating Japan in World War II , Soviet forces occupied the Korean Peninsula north of the 38th parallel and U.S. forces occupied the south. Korea was intended to be reunited eventually, but the Soviets established a communist regime in their zone, while in 1947 the United Nations assumed control of the U.S. zone and sought to foster a democratic pan-Korean state. Amid partisan warfare in the south, the Republic of Korea was established in 1948. By 1950 the violence had convinced North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung that a war under Soviet auspices was necessary for reunification. 

Prior to Kim Il-Sung ’s Soviet-backed invasion in 1950, the United States military was involved in rebuilding Korea south of the 38th parallel and training a standing South Korean army. When the United Nations Security Council called for member nations to defend South Korea, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur took charge of the United Nations Command . Thereafter, U.S. troops constituted the bulk of the UN’s expeditionary force in Korea. 

After the partition of the Korean Peninsula in 1945, the Soviet Union was instrumental in purging its zone of political dissidents and supporting the ruling communist party . The U.S.S.R. backed communist leader Kim Il-Sung ’s 1950 invasion of South Korea . When the invasion was beaten back, China sent a formidable expeditionary force into Korea, first to drive the United Nations Command out of the north and then to unify the peninsula under communist control. 

The armed conflict in Korea, which began in 1950, lasted three years and claimed the lives of millions of Korean soldiers and civilians on both sides, hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers, and more than 36,000 U.S. soldiers. However, the United States never formally declared war on North Korea , China, or the Soviet Union. And, although the U.S. military led the United Nations ’ expeditionary force, its involvement was tied only to a UN Security Council resolution, because the UN itself cannot declare war. Consequently, the conflict in Korea did not technically constitute a war. 

On July 27, 1953, the United Nations Command reached an armistice with China and North Korea . A demilitarized zone (DMZ) was established along the 38th parallel , and, following controversial allegations that North Korea had abused and murdered prisoners of war (POWs), the process of repatriating POWs underwent “neutral nation” management. Critically, the terms of the armistice were tacitly approved but never formally signed on to by the South Korean government. Hence, peace between the North and the South remains fragile.

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Korean War , conflict between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea ( North Korea ) and the Republic of Korea ( South Korea ) in which at least 2.5 million persons lost their lives. The war reached international proportions in June 1950 when North Korea, supplied and advised by the Soviet Union , invaded the South. The United Nations , with the United States as the principal participant, joined the war on the side of the South Koreans, and the People’s Republic of China came to North Korea’s aid. After more than a million combat casualties had been suffered on both sides, the fighting ended in July 1953 with Korea still divided into two hostile states. Negotiations in 1954 produced no further agreement, and the front line has been accepted ever since as the de facto boundary between North and South Korea.

The Korean War had its immediate origins in the collapse of the Japanese empire at the end of World War II in September 1945. Unlike China, Manchuria, and the former Western colonies seized by Japan in 1941–42, Korea, annexed to Japan since 1910 , did not have a native government or a colonial regime waiting to return after hostilities ceased. Most claimants to power were harried exiles in China, Manchuria , Japan, the U.S.S.R., and the United States. They fell into two broad categories. The first was made up of committed Marxist revolutionaries who had fought the Japanese as part of the Chinese-dominated guerrilla armies in Manchuria and China. One of these exiles was a minor but successful guerrilla leader named Kim Il-sung , who had received some training in Russia and had been made a major in the Soviet army. The other Korean nationalist movement, no less revolutionary, drew its inspiration from the best of science, education, and industrialism in Europe, Japan, and America. These “ultranationalists” were split into rival factions, one of which centred on Syngman Rhee , educated in the United States and at one time the president of a dissident Korean Provisional Government in exile.

In their hurried effort to disarm the Japanese army and repatriate the Japanese population in Korea (estimated at 700,000), the United States and the Soviet Union agreed in August 1945 to divide the country for administrative purposes at the 38th parallel (latitude 38° N). At least from the American perspective, this geographic division was a temporary expedient; however, the Soviets began a short-lived reign of terror in northern Korea that quickly politicized the division by driving thousands of refugees south. The two sides could not agree on a formula that would produce a unified Korea, and in 1947 U.S. President Harry S. Truman persuaded the United Nations (UN) to assume responsibility for the country, though the U.S. military remained nominally in control of the South until 1948. Both the South Korean national police and the constabulary doubled in size, providing a southern security force of about 80,000 by 1947. In the meantime, Kim Il-sung strengthened his control over the Communist Party as well as the northern administrative structure and military forces. In 1948 the North Korean military and police numbered about 100,000, reinforced by a group of southern Korean guerrillas based at Haeju in western Korea.

The creation of an independent South Korea became UN policy in early 1948. Southern communists opposed this, and by autumn partisan warfare had engulfed parts of every Korean province below the 38th parallel. The fighting expanded into a limited border war between the South’s newly formed Republic of Korea Army (ROKA) and the North Korean border constabulary as well as the North’s Korean People’s Army (KPA). The North launched 10 cross-border guerrilla incursions in order to draw ROKA units away from their guerrilla-suppression campaign in the South.

In its larger purpose the partisan uprising failed: the Republic of Korea (ROK) was formed in August 1948, with Syngman Rhee as president. Nevertheless, almost 8,000 members of the South Korean security forces and at least 30,000 other Koreans lost their lives. Many of the victims were not security forces or armed guerrillas at all but simply people identified as “rightists” or “reds” by the belligerents . Small-scale atrocities became a way of life.

The partisan war also delayed the training of the South Korean army. In early 1950, American advisers judged that fewer than half of the ROKA’s infantry battalions were even marginally ready for war. U.S. military assistance consisted largely of surplus light weapons and supplies. Indeed, General Douglas MacArthur , commander of the United States’ Far East Command (FECOM), argued that his Eighth Army, consisting of four weak divisions in Japan, required more support than the Koreans.

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Photo Essay: Korean War hero laid to rest in return to Wisconsin hometown after 73 years , Part I

By Scott Sturkol November 25, 2023

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Services for Pfc. Charles Dickman are shown on Oct. 21, 2023, in Cashton, Wis.

Pfc. Charles Dickman was only 17 years old when he died fighting in the Korean War on July 12, 1950, as a heavy weapons infantryman with Company M, 3rd Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment, 24th Infantry Division. But he never made it home.

On June 20, 2023, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced they had identified the remains Pfc. Dickman officially. And on Oct. 21, 2023, finally, Pfc. Dickman made it home to Cashton, Wis.

A funeral mass was set up Oct. 21 in Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Cashton with hundreds of people in attendance and a graveside service immediately followed.

A U.S. Army Funeral Honors Team from Fort McCoy, Wis., presented the U.S. flag to the family at the service on behalf of the Army.

In addition to his funeral on Oct. 21, throughout the state of Wisconsin, flags of the United States and the state of Wisconsin were flown at half-staff in honor of Dickman by order of the state’s governor.

Learn more about Fort McCoy online at https://home.army.mil/mccoy, on Facebook by searching “ftmccoy,” and on Twitter by searching “usagmccoy.”

Also try downloading the Digital Garrison app to your smartphone and set “Fort McCoy” or another installation as your preferred base. Fort McCoy is also part of Army’s Installation Management Command where “We Are The Army’s Home.”

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Korean War hero laid to rest in return to Wisconsin hometown after 73 years

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Korean War: History, Causes, and Effects Essay

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Introduction

Causes of korean war, the causes of korean war are generally, course of the conflict, effect of korean war to american foreign policy.

Bibliography

The Korean War which is termed as the forgotten war was a military conflict that started in June 1950 between North Korean who were supported by peoples republic of China backed by Soviet Union and South Korean with support from the United Nations and the American forces.

The war was an episode of cold war where by the United States of America and Russia were fighting ideologically behind the scenes by using South and North Korea as their battle zone. After the world war two, British and American forces set a pro-western government in the southern part of Korean Peninsula while the Soviet Union initiated a communist rule in the North. The net effect of these ideological differences was the Korean War.

The causes of the Korean War can be examined in two facets:

• Ideological

Politically, the Soviet Union wanted Korea to be loyal to Russia .This was because Korea was seen as a springboard that would be used to initiate an attack on Russia. Korean being loyal to Russia was a strategy to prevent future aggression.

The major cause of the war however, was difference in ideology between South and North Korea with Russia and America behind the scene. The two Korean zones established two separate governments with different ideologies. This were the major event that initiated the conflict In Korea.

American and Soviet military occupation in North and South Korea.

The American and Soviet forces occupation in Korea divided the country on ideological basis. These differences resulted to the formation of 38 th parallel which was a border between South and North Korea. This boarder increasingly became politically contested by the two functions and attracted cross boarder raids. The situation became even worse when these cross border skirmishes escalated to open warfare when North Korean army attacked South Korea on June 1950.The two super power majorly the American and Soviet Union acted by providing support and war equipment’s to the two conflicting sides.

Role of the America and Soviet Union in armament and military support to South and NorthKorea.

The Russians backed the communist regime in North Korea with the help of Kim Il-Sung and established North Korean Peoples Army which was equipped by Russian made war equipments. In South Korea, American backed government benefited from training and support from the Americans army.

Military and strategic imbalance between North and South Korea

The America and Russia failure to withdraw their troops by the late 1948, led to tensions between the two sides. By 1949, the American had started to withdraw its troops but the Russian troops still remained in North Korea considering that Korea lay as its strategic base.

This was followed by invasion of South Korea by the North Korean army because of the military imbalance that existed in the region. This forced the American to return back and give reinforcement to South Korea which was by then over ran by North Korean Army in support of the Russian troops.

Korea, a formally a Japanese colony before the end of the Second World War, changed hands to allied powers after the defeat of Japan in the year 1948. The Americans occupied the southern part of Korea while the Soviet occupied the Northern region. Korea by this time was divided along 38 th parallel which demarked the boarder of the two governments.38 th parallel was an area of 2.5-mile that was a demilitarized zone between north and South Korea.

In June 1950, the North Korean people army attacked South Korea by crossing 38 th parallel. On June 28 th the same year Rhee who was the then leader of South Korean evacuated Seoul and ordered the bombardment of bridge across Han River to prevent North Korean forces from advancing south wards.

The inversion of South Korea forced Americans to intervene and on June 25 th 1950, United Nations in support of South Korea, jointly condemned North Korea’s action to invade the South. USSR challenged the decision and claimed that the Security Council resolution was based on the American intelligence and North Korea was not invited to the Security Council meeting which was a violation of the U.N. charter article 32.

North Korea continued its offensive utilizing both air and land invasion by use of about 231,000 military personnel. This offensive was successful in capturing significant southern territories such as Kaesong, Ongjin, chuncheon and Uijeonghu.

In this expedition, the North Korea people’s army used heavy military equipment such as 105T-34 and T-85 tanks, 150 Yak fighters and 200 artillery pieces. The South Korean forces were ill prepared for such offensive and within days they were overran by the advancing Northern army. Most of Southern forces either surrendered or joined the Northern Korean army. In response to this aggression, the then American president Henry Truman gave an order to general Mac Arthur who was stationed in Japan to transfer the troops in Japan to combat in Korea.

The battle of Osan was the first involvement of the American army in the Korean war. The war involved a task force comprised of 540 infantry men from 24 th infantry division on July 5 th 1950. This task force was unsuccessful in its campaign to repel the North Korean army and instead suffered a casualty of 180 soldiers of whom were either dead, wounded or taken prisoner. The task force lacked effective military equipment to fight the North Koreans T-34 and T-85 tanks. The American 24 th division suffered heavy loses and were pushed back to Taejeon.

Between August and September 1950, there was a significant escalation of conflict in Korea. This was the start of the battle of Pusan perimeter. At this battle, the American forces attempted to recapture then taken territories by the North Korean army. The United States Air force slowed North Korean advances by destroying 32 bridges.

The intense bombardment by the United States air force, made North Korean Units to fight during the nights and hide in ground tunnels during the day. The U.S. army destroyed transportation hubs and other key logistic positions which paralyzed North Korean advances.

Between October and December 1950, the Chinese entered the war on the side of the North Koreans. The United States seventh fleet was dispatched to protect Taiwan from people’s Republic of China under Mao Zedong. In 15 th October 1950, Charlie Company and 70 th Tank battalion Captured Namchonjam city and two days later Pyongyang which was the Capital of North Korea fell to the American 1 st cavalry division.

The first major offensive by China took place on 25 October by attacking the advancing U.N. forces at Sino-Korean border. Fighting on 38 th parallel happened between January and June 1951 when the U.N. command forces were ambushed by Chinese troops. The U.N. forces retreated to Suwon in the west.

On July 10 th 1951, there was a stalemate between the two warring sides which led to armistice being negotiated. The negotiation went on for the next two years. The armistice deal was reached with formation of Korean demilitarized zone ending the war. Both sides withdrew for their combat position. The U.N. was given the mandate to see a peaceful and fair resolution of the conflict in the effort to end the war. The war resulted to about 1,187,682 deaths and unprecedented destruction of property.

The Korean War on the side of Americans perpetuated the Truman’s doctrine which was of the opinion that Russia was trying to influence the world with forceful communist ideology and therefore the United States of America would help any country that was under threat of communist.

The Korean conflict also brought into focus in future efforts to win communism from spreading allover the world. The United States realized that the best solution to stop the spreading of communism ideology was to be military in nature. The war also made America to recognize China as a powerful military might in Asia. Future diplomatic actions would need to take into account Chinas potential might.

After the war, military assistance was provided to Philippine government, French Indochina and Taiwan with the motive to contain the spread of communism in Asia. This military assistance would extend also in Europe to country under communist threat of occupation.

Feldman, Tenzerh. The Korean war . Minneapolis: Twenty-First Century Books, 2004.

Fitzgerald, Brian. The Korean war: American’s forgotten wa r. Minneapolis: Compass Point Books, 2006.

Stueck, William. The Korean war : An international history. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997.

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Home — Essay Samples — War — Korean War

Essays on Korean War

Korean war essay topics and outline examples, essay title 1: the korean war (1950-1953): uncovering the origins, cold war context, and global implications.

Thesis Statement: This essay delves into the complex origins of the Korean War, the Cold War context that fueled the conflict, and the far-reaching global implications of the war, including its impact on international alliances and the division of Korea.

• Introduction
• Background and Historical Context: Pre-war Korea and Its Division
• The Cold War Setting: U.S.-Soviet Rivalry and Proxy Wars
• The Outbreak of War: North Korea's Invasion and International Response
• The Course of the Conflict: Battles, Truce Talks, and Stalemate
• Global Implications: The Korean War's Impact on East Asia and International Relations
• Legacy and Repercussions: The Division of Korea and Ongoing Tensions

Essay Title 2: The Korean War's Forgotten Heroes: Examining the Role of United Nations Forces and the Armistice Agreement

Thesis Statement: This essay focuses on the often-overlooked contributions of United Nations forces in the Korean War, the complexities of the Armistice Agreement, and the enduring impact of the war on Korean society and international peacekeeping efforts.

• The United Nations Coalition: Multinational Forces in Korea
• The Armistice Negotiations: Challenges, Agreements, and Ongoing Tensions
• Forgotten Heroes: Stories of Courage and Sacrifice
• Korean War Veterans: Their Post-War Experiences and Commemoration
• Peacekeeping and Reconciliation Efforts: The Role of the United Nations
• Implications for Modern International Conflict Resolution

Essay Title 3: The Korean War and the Origins of the Cold War: Analyzing the Impact on U.S.-Soviet Relations and Global Alliances

Thesis Statement: This essay explores how the Korean War influenced U.S.-Soviet relations, the formation of military alliances such as NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and the Cold War's evolution into a global struggle for influence.

• The Korean War as a Catalyst: Escalation of Cold War Tensions
• Military Alliances: NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and the Globalization of the Cold War
• The U.S.-Soviet Confrontation: Proxy Warfare and Diplomatic Efforts
• International Response and Support for North and South Korea
• The Aftermath of the Korean War: Paving the Way for Future Cold War Conflicts
• Assessing the Korean War's Long-Term Impact on U.S.-Soviet Relations

The Korean War – a Conflict Between The Soviet Union and The United States

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The Role of The Korean War in History

The origin of the korean conflict, the role of the battle of chipyong-ni in the korean war, the korean war and its impact on lawrence werner, let us write you an essay from scratch.

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Historical Accuracy of The Book Korean War by Maurice Isserman

Solutions for disputes and disloyalty, depiction of the end of the korean war in the film the front line, the impact of war on korea.

25 June, 1950 - 27 July, 1953

Korean Peninsula, Yellow Sea, Sea of Japan, Korea Strait, China–North Korea border.

China, North Korea, South Korea, United Nations, United States

Korean War was a conflict between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) and the Republic of Korea (South Korea) in which at least 2.5 million persons lost their lives. The war reached international proportions in June 1950 when North Korea, supplied and advised by the Soviet Union, invaded the South.

North Korean invasion of South Korea repelled; US-led United Nations invasion of North Korea repelled; Chinese and North Korean invasion of South Korea repelled; Korean Armistice Agreement signed in 1953; Korean conflict ongoing.

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Korean War reminds us freedom must be defended

Fighting very hard in 1950 meant that 50 million south koreans get to be free now. our actions of today affect not only ourselves but millions yet to come, far into the future..

Sam Casali (left), a 95-year-old Marine Corps veteran who worked with aviation ordinance in Korea in 1952, shakes hands with Consul Taesu Yeo (right) after being presented with the Korean Ambassador for Peace medal at the American Legion’s George W. Benjamin Post 791 in Northbrook. Vice Consul Jongyun Ra (center) also attended Tuesday’s event.

Neil Steinberg/Sun-Times

American Legion George W. Benjamin Post 791, a small storefront on Shermer Road in Northbrook, was packed with vets on Tuesday. Brianna Owen, 18, read her essay that won a $1,500 scholarship toward tuition next fall at Ithaca College, where she will play volleyball as an outside hitter.

“This planet that we are on together is a beautiful one,” she began. “We are all very lucky to be on it. However, this planet is also dangerous ...”

After she finished, the assembled said the Pledge of Allegiance. Thomas Mahoney, post chaplain, led the opening prayer.

“Please uncover,” Mahoney said. He thanked God, “source of all our freedom,” then added: “We humbly request a special blessing on those individuals in this room tonight who in serving both God and country preserved our freedom and the freedom of the people of the Republic of Korea.”

The Republic of Korea — what we think of as “South Korea,” when we think of it at all — doesn’t get name checked much in prayers at American Legion halls. But there were three guests from the Consulate General of the Republic of Korea in Chicago: Consul Taesu Yeo, resplendent in his police uniform, Vice Consul Jongyun Ra and cultural coordinator Eojin Shin.

They brought along two Ambassador for Peace medals, given to service members who fought in the Korean War. The medals were presented to Salvatore Casali, 95, an Evanston resident, and, posthumously, to the family of Mario Faldani.

“We honor the courage, sacrifice and selflessness of those who answered the call of duty and served,” vice consul Ra said. “We remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice, laying down their lives during the Korean War. On behalf of the Korean people, I extend my deepest gratitude. Your service and sacrifice have secured the blessings of liberty for generations to come.”

That last line summarized the reason I was there. While I am not a regular attendee of honorary ceremonies, South Korea is a lesson worth reminding Americans of, as we struggle to shore up freedom around the world, in general, and support Ukraine as it fends off Russia, in particular.

Liberty seems to bore us. Freedom draws a yawn. Look at the news. North Korea is frequently there. Kim Jong Un, the supreme all-powerful dictator son of the previous supreme, all-powerful dictator, Kim Jong-il. Who in turn was the son of Kim Il Sung, president when the country was created in 1948. In a totalitarian state, only death tends to change leadership, which is why North Korea has had three rulers in 76 years.

That might seem a sign of strength. But Kim Jong Un’s ceaseless threats and sabre-rattling — or, more precise, missile-rattling — is a sign of weakness. His constant barrage of garbage — verbal garbage, mostly, though lately North Korea has taken to floating actual garbage over the South and releasing it from balloons — is a junkie scramble for undeserved attention. Dictatorships make mistakes, because being surrounded by cringing underlings, it’s easy to blunder. Ask Vladimir Putin.

The constant showboating of the North is so weirdly fascinating, it’s almost possible to forget there is a South Korea. Its population is 51 million, with a capital, Seoul, that’s triple the size of Chicago. It’s a true economic miracle. Maybe the best way to understand the difference between the two Koreas: South Korea’s GDP is 40 times larger than that of the North, where citizens periodically starve to death.

South Korea is also a vibrant democracy — maybe more vibrant than our own. In 2016, South Koreans protested in the streets, and President Park Geun-hye was impeached on charges of corruption and abuse of power. She ended up in jail. We impeached a now-former president twice — the second time, for inciting the mob that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — and he seems headed not to prison but back to the White House.

Because we made a sacrifice in 1950, after North Korea invaded the South, and pushed the Communists out of the country after three years of brutal warfare that cost about 36,000 American lives, 50 million people aren’t forced to live in a totalitarian hellscape.

I’d say it was worth it. But many Americans seem to be taking their eye off the ball. We aren’t concerned with preserving liberty in our own country, never mind defending it anywhere else. We need to rethink that, not only for ourselves, but for our young people.

“That’s how I intend to make the world a better place,” Owen concluded. “By having an open mind and being willing to work.”

I’d say our work is cut out for us.

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The Korean War

Grumman F9F-2 Panther fighters, of Fighter Squadron 721 (VF-721) from Boxer (CV-21) over Wonsan, North Korea, during the Seige of Wonsan. Photo is dated 15 July 1951. Note the five-inch rockets (with two different types of warheads) under the nearer F9F's wings. Wonsan port area is immediately behind that plane. Wonsan airfield is at left with the Namdae River beyond. (Official US Navy photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives, 80-G-431907)

(1950–1953)

The outbreak of the Korean War caught naval aviation in the midst of transition. The establishment of the National Military Establishment in 1947 and its reorganization in 1949, when it was renamed the Department of Defense, required adjustments that had not been completed by the outbreak of war. Successive budgetary decreases had reduced the size of the service, and a reorganization of operating forces to keep them within the prescribed limits had begun.

New weapons and equipment had not been fully integrated and tactical doctrine and operating techniques for their employment were still under development. The introduction of jet aircraft created a composite force in which either jet or propeller-driven aircraft that differed in performance characteristics, maintenance requirements, and tactical applications equipped comparable commands.

The seesaw clashes on the ground during the first six months of the war demanded flexibility of force. In addition, the need to sustain carrier air power over a landmass for extended periods imposed command and logistical burdens.

Carrier aircraft flew deep support missions; attacked supply lines; roamed over enemy territory for targets of opportunity; bombed bridges; interdicted highways and railroads; attacked refineries, railroad yards, and hydroelectric plants; and escorted land-based bombers on special missions. Helicopters assumed an increasingly significant role as they rescued downed aircrew, evacuated wounded, flew short-range supply missions to Marines and soldiers ashore, spotted shore bombardment gunfire for ships, and scoured coastal areas for mines.

During the three years of war, Navy and Marine aircraft flew 276,000 combat sorties and dropped 177,000 tons of bombs. They reached within 7,000 sorties of World War II totals in all theaters, and surpassed the bomb tonnage by 74,000 tons.

Away from combat, advances in guided missile technology brought the new weapons into operational status. The ships and submarines to employ them readied for action. The launching of ships and  research missiles from shore installations provided useful data and experience.

Research in high-speed flight, assisted by specially designed aircraft, provided data that led toward advances in aircraft performance. The carrier modernization program continued and underwent revision to incorporate steam catapults and angled flight decks.

Significant Dates

7 February 1950 —In a demonstration of carrier long-range attack capabilities, pilot Cmdr. Thomas Robinson took off in a P2V-3C Neptune from  Franklin D. Roosevelt  (CVB-42) off Jacksonville, Florida, and flew over Charleston, South Carolina, the Bahamas, the Panama Canal, up the coast of Central America, and over Mexico, landing the next day at Municipal Airport, San Francisco, California. The flight covered 5,060 miles in 25 hours, 59 minutes, the longest to date made from a carrier deck.

8 April 1950 —Soviet aircraft shot down a PB4Y-2 , BuNo 59645, of VP-26 Detachment A—based at NAS Port Lyautey, in French Morocco, but on patrol from Wiesbaden, West Germany—over the Baltic Sea off the coast of Liepaja, Latvia. Searchers recovered pieces of wreckage, but all ten men on board the Privateer died.

25 June 1950 —Despite warnings from multiple intelligence sources, the North Koreans, achieving tactical surprise, invaded South Korea, initiating the Korean War. The United States asked for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, which then adopted a resolution condemning the North Korean aggression, demanded the withdrawal of North Korean troops above the 38th parallel, and called on all members to assist the UN in the execution of the resolution. The Soviets had boycotted the council in protest of ongoing American support of the Chinese Nationalists and the Soviets' absence prevented their veto of the motion.

3 July 1950 —Carrier aircraft went into action during the Korean War.  Valley Forge  (CV-45) —the only operational US carrier in the western Pacific when the war began—with CVG-5 embarked and British carrier  Triumph  (R-16) operating in the Yellow Sea with Fairy Firefly FR.1s. Supermarine Seafire FR.47s of Nos. 827 and 800 Squadrons, respectively, launched strikes on North Korean airfields, supply lines, and transportation facilities in the area of Pyongyang. These raids marked the baptism by fire for F9F-3 Panthers and AD Skyraiders . Navy pilots also registered their initial kills in aerial combat during the Korean War and the first by Navy jets. Lt. j.g. Leonard H. Plog and Ens. Elton W. Brown Jr. of VF-51 piloted two F9F-3s and shot down two enemy Yakovlev Yak-9P Franks over Pyongyang.

Capt. David Booker, USMC (left) mans his aerial reconnaissance plane on the flight deck of a US Navy aircraft carrier with the Seventh Fleet. Photo released on 19 July 1950. If the view was taken at about that time, the carrier would be Valley Forge (CV-45), then the only 7th Fleet carrier, which was engaged in early Korean War operations. Booker's plane is a Vought F4U-5P Corsair. Note its camera hatch low on the fuselage behind the cockpit. (Official US Navy photograph, from the All Hands collection at the Naval History and Heritage Command, NH96998)

4 December 1950 —Ens. Jesse L. Brown of VF-31—the first African American to complete the Navy’s basic flight training program for pilot qualification and to be designated a naval aviator—embarked on board  Leyte  (CV-32) , flew a close support mission in an F4U-4 Corsair over Hagaru-ri, North Korea. Antiaircraft fire struck the Corsair and he made an emergency landing beyond Chosin. As darkness approached and the temperature fell, his wingman, Lt. j.g. Thomas J. Hudner , deliberately crash-landed nearby and attempted to pull Brown from the burning wreck. With the buckled fuselage trapping the pilot’s legs, Hudner packed snow around Brown to protect him from the flames and returned to his aircraft to radio for a rescue helicopter. An HO3S-1 flown by 1st Lt. Charles C. Ward, USMC, of VMO-6 responded, and after repeated unsuccessful attempts to free Brown, had to leave him with the onset of nightfall. Brown died and Ward rescued Hudner, who subsequently received the Medal of Honor .

Ensign Jesse L. Brown, USN in the cockpit of an F4U-4 Corsair fighter, circa 1950. Jesse L. Brown was the first African American to complete US Navy flight training and the first African American naval aviator in combat and to be killed in combat. He flew with Fighter Squadron 32 (VF-32) from Leyte (CV-32). Ensign Brown received the Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions in Korea, and he was honored with ship Jessie L. Brown (FF-1089). (Official US Navy photograph, USN 1146845)

2 April 1951 —Two F9F-2B Panthers of VF-191, each loaded with four 250- and two 100-pound general-purpose bombs, catapulted from  Princeton  (CV-37) to attack a railroad bridge near Songjin, North Korea. Their attack marked the Navy’s first recorded use of jet aircraft as bombers.

Four F9F-2 Panther jet fighters roar past the carrier, with dive brakes, landing gear and arresting hooks down, preparing to land on board after returning from a mission over North Korea, 23 June 1951. The planes and their pilots are from Fighter Squadron 721 (VF-721), a Naval Reserve squadron formerly based at Naval Air Station, Glenview, Illinois. (Official US Navy photograph, from the collections of the Naval History and Heritage Command, NH 97281)

23 June 1953 —Lt. Cmdr. George H. Whisler Jr., attached to VR-31, completed the first transcontinental roundtrip solo flight between sunrise and sunset. Whisler departed NAS Norfolk, Virginia., in an F9F-6 Cougar, BuNo 127432, and after stops at NAS Memphis, Tennessee, and Webb AFB, Texas, landed at NAS North Island, California. He then took off in an F3D-2 Sky Knight, BuNo 127076, from North Island, refueled at NAS Dallas, Texas, and landed at Norfolk.

11 July 1953 —Maj. John F. Bolt , USMC, made his fifth and sixth MiG kills of the Korean War while operating with the 39th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron of the Fifth Air Force. He flew an F-86E Sabre named Darling Dottie, Serial No. 52-2852, when his second section of four aircraft turned for base because of low fuel. Bolt spotted four MiGs and despite diminishing fuel attacked, with his wingman, the enemy head-on and repeatedly engaged the MiGs. He became the first U.S. naval aviator to attain five victories in jet aerial combat and the only Marine ace of the Korean War. Bolt received the Navy Cross for this action.

Major John F. Bolt, USMC, seated in a US Air Force F-86E Sabre jet fighter. This plane is an F-86E-6, serial # 52-2852. Note pilot's name painted on the canopy frame, with victory stars and nickname Darling Dottie painted below. Photo is dated 13 July 1953, two days after Major Bolt shot down his fifth and sixth MiG-15s to become the only US Marine Corps air Ace of the Korean War. He achieved the aerial victories while flying with the 5th Air Force as an exchange pilot. The original caption states, "Major Bolt, who shot down six Japanese planes during World War II, has flown 89 jet fighter-bomber missions with the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing, which has been assigned only close support and interdiction missions in Korea. He has flown 37 Saberjet sweeps with the 5th Air Force, which is carrying the air war to the MiGs." (Photographed by TSgt. Tom Donalds, US Marine Corps photograph, USMC A348324)

16 July 1953 —Lt. Guy P. Bordelon Jr., temporarily deployed ashore with VC-3 Detachment D to intercept communist night harassment raids against Seoul, shot down a North Korean Polikarpov Po-2 biplane while flying an F4U-5N Corsair . This battle marked Bordelon’s fifth kill and made him the Navy’s only ace of the Korean War.

27 July 1953 —United Nations and communist representatives signed an armistice at Panmunjom, Korea, which ended the major fighting of the Korean War. Isolated outbreaks occurred for years, however, because of North Korean violations of the agreement.

Additional Resources

United States Naval Aviation 1910-2010

The U.S. Navy in the Cold War Era, 1945-1991

The Social History of the U.S. Navy, 1945-Present

List of Patrol Squadron Deployments to Korea during the War

Korean War: Chronology of U.S. Pacific Fleet Operations, January–June 1951

Naval Aviation's Involvement in the Korean War

Korean War Combat Action Reports for Carrier Air Groups

Remembering the Forgotten War, Korea 1950-1953

Inchon, South Korea. Because Inchon harbor was so shallow and muddy, the timing of the invasion had to be synchronized precisely with the autumn high tides so landing craft could make it to the shore without running aground on the mud flats. In addition, Wolmi-do (Wolmi Island) provided defenders with a strong garrison flanking the harbor. In spite of intelligence warning of the attack, the overextended North Korean army was unable to maintain a strong defense. The city fell with Allied losses of only 20 dead and 179 wounded. (Drawing, colored pencil on paper, by Herbert C. Hahn; circa 1951. (88-191-BB)

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News Analysis

Russia Sends Waves of Troops to the Front in a Brutal Style of Fighting

More than 1,000 Russian soldiers in Ukraine were killed or wounded on average each day in May, according to NATO and Western military officials.

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By Julian E. Barnes ,  Eric Schmitt and Marc Santora

Julian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt reported from Washington, and Marc Santora from Kyiv, Ukraine.

May was a particularly deadly month for the Russian army in Ukraine, with an average of more than 1,000 of its soldiers injured or killed each day, according to U.S., British and other Western intelligence agencies.

But despite its losses, Russia is recruiting 25,000 to 30,000 new soldiers a month — roughly as many as are exiting the battlefield, U.S. officials said. That has allowed its army to keep sending wave after wave of troops at Ukrainian defenses, hoping to overwhelm them and break through the trench lines.

It is a style of warfare that Russian soldiers have likened to being put into a meat grinder, with commanding officers seemingly oblivious to the fact that they are sending infantry soldiers to die.

At times, this approach has proved effective, bringing the Russian army victories in Avdiivka and Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine. But Ukrainian and Western officials say the tactics were less successful this spring, as Russia tried to take land near the city of Kharkiv.

American officials said that Russia achieved a critical objective of President Vladimir V. Putin, creating a buffer zone along the border to make it more difficult for the Ukrainians to strike into the country.

But the drive did not threaten Kharkiv and was ultimately stopped by Ukrainian defenses, according to Western officials.

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