Korean War

A AMERICA AT

WAR W WA AR A

KOREAN WAR Revised Edition

AMERICA AT WAR Revolutionary War, Revised Edition War of 1812, Revised Edition U.S.-Mexican War, Revised Edition Civil War, Revised Edition Plains Indian Wars, Revised Edition Spanish-American War, Revised Edition World War I, Revised Edition World War II, Revised Edition Korean War, Revised Edition Vietnam War, Revised Edition Persian Gulf War, Revised Edition Afghanistan War Iraq War, Revised Edition Chronology of Wars, Revised Edition

A AMERICA AT

WAR W WA AR A

KOREAN WAR Revised Edition

MAURICE ISSERMAN JOHN S. BOWMAN general editor

Korean War, Revised Edition Copyright © 2010, 2003, 1992 by Maurice Isserman All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information contact: Chelsea House An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Isserman, Maurice. Korean war / Maurice Isserman. — Rev. ed. p. cm. — (America at war) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8160-8186-8 (hc : alk. paper); ISBN 978-1-4381-3153-5 (e-book) 1. Korean War, 1950–1953—Juvenile literature. 2. Korean War, 1950–1953—United States—Juvenile literature. I. Title. DS919.I77 2011 951.904'2—dc22 2009036873 Chelsea House books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Text design by Erika K. Arroyo Cover design by Takeshi Takahashi Composition by Hermitage Publishing Services Cover printed by Bang Printing, Brainerd, Minn. Book printed and bound by Bang Printing, Brainerd, Minn. Date printed: September 2010 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Note on Photos Many of the illustrations and photographs used in this book are old, historical images. The quality of the prints is not always up to modern standards, as in some cases the originals are damaged. The content of the illustrations, however, made their inclusion important despite problems in reproduction.

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Contents PREFACE

1  Task Force smiTh 

Northwest Pacific, 1950 North Korean Offensive, Summer 1950

Japan: Forward Base for the U.S. War Effort

2  Background To War 

Growth of the Japanese Empire, 1931–1941

Soviet Nuclear Weapons: Why the Korean War Did Not Involve Atomic Warfare Kim Il Sung’s 1949–1950 Conversations with Stalin

3  deFeaT and reTreaT  A Just War?

Fall of Taejon, July 19–20, 1950

End of Segregation in the U.S. Military The No Gun Ri Controversy

4  Pusan and inchon 

Mobilization of U.S. Reserves in Korea Canada’s Role in the Korean War Inchon Campaign, September 15–30, 1950

5  disasTer in The norTh  “Two Chinas” Confront Each Other UN Offensive, Fall 1950

The U.S. Air Force in the Korean War

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ix 1 2 5 11 14 18 21 24 27 32 39 42 44 47 50 54 57 63 67 71 76

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6

ridgway Takes coMMand Chinese Intervention, November 1950–January 1951

Helicopters in the Korean War McCarthyism Reevaluated in Light of New Evidence

7

Long road To Peace

“Germ Warfare” and Communist Propaganda U.S. POWs in the Korean War Korean War, 1950–1953

8 weaPons and TacTics Inside Inchon Sandbag Castle Jet Fighter Planes

9

Lessons FroM a ForgoTTen war

U.S. Media and the Korean War The Two Koreas a Half-Century after the Korean War

GLOSSARY FURTHER READING INDEx

83 85 90 97 104 106 115 120 122 126 130 132 136 137 140 144 148 151

Preface The Korean War began in June 1950 and ended three years and one month later. Fifty-four thousand Americans died in the war, in addition to 1 million Chinese and perhaps 3.5 million Koreans. Despite this bloody record, the war is sometimes called America’s forgotten war. This book is a revised edition of The Korean War, originally published in 1992 and then updated in 2003 as part of the Facts On File’s America at War series. As such, it offers even more new features. These include an entirely new chapter on weaponry and tactics employed in the Korean War, a sidebar that considers the arguments for and against the belief that the Korean War was a just war, many new color illustrations, and an updated bibliography. Since the first edition of this book was published, Americans have been given repeated reminders that the Korean War does not deserve to be forgotten. One factor reminding Americans of the war’s importance has been the passing of the generation of Americans who fought in Korea. Obituary columns in the nation’s newspapers regularly feature reports of the death of the now-elderly veterans of the Korean War. One such report ran in April 2002, in the New York Times, marking the death at age 82 of U.S. Marine Corps veteran William E. Barber. Barber was already a decorated combat veteran of World War II when the Korean War broke out in 1950. As a marine captain, he commanded Company F of the 2nd Battalion of the Seventh Marines, 1st Marine Division. He and his troops were part of the U.S. forces that spearheaded the counterattack against North Korea in the autumn of 1950. They were driving their way up the eastern side of North Korea toward the Yalu River that November when Chinese Communist forces launched an attack that turned back the American advance. In what became known as the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir—which is fully described in this volume—the marines made a legendary fighting ix

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retreat in the face of overwhelming odds. Captain Barber was in the thick of the battle. At a critical moment in the marine withdrawal, Barber’s company was assigned to hold a hill overlooking the Toktong Pass, a vital link on the road the Americans were taking to safety. Thousands of their fellow marines depended on Company F’s ability to defend that hilltop. Under heavy Chinese attack, for five days and six nights, despite subzero weather and heavy snow and despite being wounded on the second day of the battle, Captain Barber kept his men fighting. “I knew that we could probably hold,” he told a reporter after the war, “and I knew that if we didn’t hold we could exact a very heavy toll.” Hector Cafferata, one of the riflemen under his command, recalled that Barber ignored his wound and refused to be treated as an invalid; instead, “he walked the line, he kept us together.” In the end, 82 of Company F’s original 240 men were left unscathed; they had killed more than 1,000 of the enemy. Captain Barber was awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor for his role in the defense of the hilltop. “He was one tough guy,” Private Cafferata recalled, something that Cafferata would know about—he won his own Medal of Honor for valor displayed in the same engagement. Aside from recognizing the courage and sacrifices made by so many Americans in the Korean War, such an obituary should serve to remind 21st-century youth that, as remote as it may seem in time and space, this war is still a very real event to many of their elders. In fact, while still overshadowed in popular memory by World War II and the Vietnam War, the Korean War became measurably less “forgotten” in the United States in the course of the 1990s. One important milestone in remembering the war took place on July 27, 1995, the 42nd anniversary of the signing of the armistice that ended the war, when the Korean War Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C., to the memory of the 1.75 million U.S. servicemen and women who took part in the conflict. Sitting on 2.2 acres adjacent to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the memorial consists of a group of 19 statues representing a column of U.S. combat foot soldiers in helmets and ponchos moving outward toward an American flag. U.S. president Bill Clinton and South Korean president Kim Dae Jung took part in the opening ceremonies. President Clinton told the audience, which included many veterans and their families, that the “free world’s participation in the Korean War, its first resolute and effective action to

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stem the expansion of Communism, changed the course of history. In this sense, I would say that the Korean War was the war that heralded the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the demise of Communism.” Historians also looked back to the war in the 1990s. Among the consequences of the “demise of Communism” was the sudden availability of new historical sources on the Korean War from the Communist side, as Soviet presidential and foreign ministry archives in Moscow were opened up for the first time to the scrutiny of Western historians. According to Kathryn Weathersby, one of the historians most familiar with these new sources, the Moscow archives “reveal a great deal more than has previously been known about the relationship between the Soviet Union and North Korea, the decision-making surrounding the attack on South Korea, the role of Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) in all stages of the war, the formulation of the Communist positions at the armistice negotiations, and the role of Stalin’s death in bringing the war to an end.” History is a work in progress. Historians are always coming up with new sources and new interpretations to guide their understanding of the past. This has certainly been true in the case of the Korean War since the 1990s. Sergei Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and xue Litai wrote one of the first of the new wave of books on the Korean War to be based on Moscow’s diplomatic archives. In Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War (1993), the three historians (one each from Russia, the United States, and China) concluded that the new sources proved conclusively that the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950 “was preplanned, blessed, and directly assisted by Stalin and his generals, and reluctantly backed by Mao at Stalin’s insistence.” Other historians, in contrast, examining the same sources, have emphasized Stalin’s reluctance to approve Kim Il Sung’s plans for invading the South and his desire to minimize the Soviet role once war did break out. Kathryn Weathersby wrote in 1995 in the bulletin of the Washington-based Cold War International History Project that the Soviet documents “show that the initiative for the North Korean attack on South Korea on 25 June 1950 was clearly Kim Il Sung’s. Kim requested Stalin’s approval several times in 1949 before the Soviet leader finally agreed in early 1950 to support a North Korean offensive.” Of the three Communist leaders involved in the decisions that led to the war, Stalin, Mao, and Kim, only Kim—the least important of the three—seemed to have no doubts that the invasion was a gamble worth taking. As

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John Lewis Gaddis showed in We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1997), Kim shuttled back and forth between Moscow and Beijing in the months before the invasion, coaxing and wheedling Stalin and Mao, reporting to each one separately that the other was a strong proponent of invasion, and “thereby achieving the feat of having exaggerated to both the Russians and the Chinese the degree to which each supported what he himself wanted to do.” Here was truly a case of the tail wagging the dog. In 1995 President Clinton spoke of the war as a notable early victory in the long struggle of the United States to contain communism. It is certainly true that the United States emerged at the end of the Korean War with a much more powerful military establishment than it had possessed in 1950 and with a much greater willingness to use that power wherever and whenever it perceived a threat of expanding Soviet influence. Many historians agree that the war proved a setback to the Soviet Union; Stalin’s successors knew better than to ever again launch a direct and open assault on an American ally. “Of the great powers,” William Stueck concluded in his well-regarded book The Korean War: An International History (1995), “the Soviet Union clearly was the prime loser by virtue of the Korean War.” But Stueck and other historians are less inclined to see the war as an unambiguous victory for the West in the cold war. If the Soviets fared poorly, that was not the case of the other emerging communist superpower—China. The Korean War, Stueck argued, “contributed enormously to the international prestige of the new China, which fought the world’s greatest power to a standstill.” U.S. policy makers would remember the impact of Chinese intervention in the Korean War, and that memory would prove a decisive factor in constraining the application of U.S. military force in its next major armed conflict, in Vietnam, a dozen years later. The Korean War left an ambiguous legacy, not least because the issues left undecided at its conclusion continue to trouble the world a half-century later. When the war ended in 1953, the communist government that ruled the northern half of the Korean Peninsula— the Democratic Republic of North Korea, as it styled itself—was an absolute dictatorship, headed by its ruthless founder Kim Il Sung. Kim would remain in power in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital city, for an additional 41 years, until his death in 1994—long outliving his principal communist allies, Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union and Mao

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Zedong of the People’s Republic of China, as well as his principal anticommunist adversaries, Syngman Rhee of South Korea and Harry S. Truman of the United States. Kim would come to enjoy the historical distinction of being the only international leader to remain alive and in power throughout the entire era of the cold war. In the meantime, of course, much of the rest of the world had changed dramatically. The cold war came to an end in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Communism in the Soviet Union—and, for that matter, the Soviet Union itself—came to an end in 1991. The People’s Republic of China would survive the 1990s and remain under the absolute rule of the Chinese Communist Party, but long before the end of the 20th century the Chinese economy had come to bear a distinct resemblance to the capitalist economies of the West. At the start of the 21st century, there remained only a few bastions of the once seemingly mighty communist system, and none of those presented a significant ideological challenge either to their neighbors or to the world’s one remaining superpower, the United States. The world changed dramatically between the 1950s and the 1990s, but North Korea did not. The country remained a grim and isolated example of all that was worst in the history of communism, representing a kind of museum piece of Stalinist misrule in its repressive totalitarian regime, its economic stagnation, and its bristling hostility to the surrounding world. Again, anyone who thinks that Korea is far removed from current concerns is not paying close attention to the news these days, news that this volume helps to place in a meaningful context. Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994 initially raised hopes, particularly in neighboring South Korea, that the next generation of North Korean leaders would be willing to abandon old hostilities and embrace change. Kim’s successor as leader of North Korea, his son Kim Jong Il (Kim Chong Il), did, in fact, make occasional gestures toward internal reform and reconciliation with the South. He allowed some South Koreans to enjoy family reunions in the North with relatives they had not seen since the Korean War. He permitted some sports and cultural exchanges between the two Koreas. And he allowed some South Korean tourists to visit the North. He also made some gestures of reconciliation toward the United States. There were tentative diplomatic contacts between the two countries, and North Korea handed over the remains of some U.S. military personnel who had been missing in action since the Korean War.

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But such gestures did not change North Korea’s status as an international pariah. Although North Korea was desperately poor, with widespread starvation reported in the countryside, North Korean leaders devoted at least 25 percent of their economy’s annual gross national product to military expenditures. North Korea’s 1 million active-duty soldiers, along with hundreds of thousands of airmen and sailors, represented the fifth largest active-duty military force in the world in the 1990s. Neighboring countries in Asia, as well as the United States, watched warily as the regime began to develop a ballistic missile system in the mid-1990s, capable of delivering conventional (and perhaps in time, nuclear) warheads to targets hundreds of miles away. In one notorious test, a North Korean missile barreled provocatively through Japanese air space. In April 2009, North Korea again defied international opinion and a United Nations resolution and launched a missile over the Pacific Ocean. The North Korean government claimed that the missile was carrying a satellite to release into orbit and was not an offensive weapon. The fact that the missile crashed before delivering its payload did not comfort North Korea’s Pacific neighbors. With the end of the cold war, many of the battlefields from that conflict began to attract hordes of the reverent and the curious. Like the tourists who regularly visit Civil War battlefields at Gettysburg National Military Park or World War II battlefields on the Normandy beaches, Americans could be found visiting places such as Khe Sanh and the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam. But there were no tourists to be found visiting the heavily militarized 38th parallel, which divides the two Koreas. Instead, there were 37,000 American soldiers on a high state of combat readiness who continued to patrol the border between the two Koreas. According to U.S. Army general Thomas A. Schwartz, commander of U.S. forces in Korea, at any given moment, “70 percent of the Army is either getting ready to go in, is in Korea, or just came out of Korea.” In the event of a renewed North Korean assault on South Korea, there is no question that the United States would quickly and massively intervene in the conflict. Captain Barber never got to revisit the hilltop where he earned his Medal of Honor. It will likely be some years before American tourists can walk the battlefields of the Chosin Reservoir or shop for souvenirs in a Pyongyang flea market. The Korean War is all too much still with people today—which is all the more reason why it is a war that should not be forgotten.

1

       On the evening of June 30, 1950, unexpected and unwelcome news reached a few hundred soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 24th Infantry Division stationed in Japan. They were told to get their gear together immediately. They were leaving for South Korea. They were going to be the first U.S. soldiers to fight in the Korean War. Five days earlier, on June 25, soldiers from Communist North Korea (known as the North Korean People’s Army, or NKPA) had launched an invasion of their noncommunist neighbor, South Korea. South Korean troops (known as Republic of Korea, or ROK, forces) were surprised, outnumbered, and outgunned by the invaders. Though some South Koreans fought bravely, many others fled in terror from the Communists. In the first week of the war, ROK forces suffered 44,000 casualties—killed, wounded, captured or missing—just under half their total strength. Unless something was done quickly, all of South Korea would fall to the invaders. On June 27, President Harry S. Truman ordered U.S. military forces based in Japan to launch air and naval strikes against the North Korean invaders in the South. Later that same day the United Nations (UN) Security Council, meeting in New York, voted in support of a resolution calling upon member nations to defend South Korea against North Korean aggression. On June 28, U.S. bombers and fighters went into action over the Korean Peninsula. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander of the U.S. Far East Command based in Japan, was given overall control of UN efforts to aid South Korea. Stretching the limits of his orders from Washington, MacArthur ordered U.S. planes to hit targets north of the 38th parallel, which divided North and South Korea, as well as the invading NKPA forces in the South. 1

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Meanwhile, the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. military services, meeting in Washington, authorized MacArthur to send U.S. ground forces to South Korea if he thought it necessary. The following day, June 29, MacArthur flew to South Korea for a quick inspection tour. He saw Seoul, the South Korean capital, in flames and about to fall to the communists. ROK forces were retreating in panic, throwing away their weapons and uniforms. When MacArthur returned to Japan later that day he cabled Washington, advising an all-out American

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in response to the invasion of south korea by the north korean army, President harry s. Truman (1884–1972) declared a state of national emergency on June 27, 1950. (Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library)

military effort, including the use of air, naval, and ground forces. Otherwise, he warned, the defense of South Korea would be “doomed to failure.” Just before midnight on June 29, Washington time, MacArthur’s cable arrived at the Pentagon, requesting the dispatch of two U.S. Army divisions to South Korea. Aides awakened President Truman at about 5 a.m. next morning with the news. Truman ordered MacArthur to get a regimental combat team of a few thousand U.S. soldiers into combat in South Korea as soon as possible; later that morning he approved orders for tens of thousands more to follow them. Even getting a few thousand troops together to fight in South Korea was no easy matter. MacArthur had four army divisions (about 50,000 men) under his command in Japan. These occupation garrisons were the nearest U.S. forces available. But they were far from combat-ready. Occupation duty in Japan was known in the postwar military as a very soft assignment. With the Japanese economy still recovering from the devastation of World War II, even enlisted men in the U.S. Army could live very comfortably there. Many enjoyed the attentions of Japanese servants and girlfriends. As a fighting force, U.S. soldiers in Japan were undertrained, poorly disciplined, and poorly equipped. And there were

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general douglas a. Macarthur (1880–1964), commander in chief of the united nations command in korea, 1950–51 (Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library)

neither plans nor the necessary planes and ships to get them to the battlefront in a hurry. While he mobilized his forces, MacArthur ordered a token force of Americans to leave immediately for South Korea. The U.S. military command in Japan believed that the sight of American soldiers at the front would improve the morale and stiffen the resistance of their South Korean allies. No one in MacArthur’s headquarters, or in Washington, respected the fighting qualities of the communist North Koreans. They referred to them as gooks—a racially insulting term. Surely when the North Koreans realized they were up against the overwhelming power of the United States of America, they would turn around and flee back to the North. Two companies of the 1st Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment, 24th Infantry Division, based on the Japanese island of Kyushu, were ordered to Korea on June 30. They were nicknamed Task Force Smith, after their commanding officer, Lt. Col. Charles “Brad” Smith, a 34-year-old West Point graduate and veteran of the Guadalcanal campaign in the Pacific in World War II. Smith’s men faced a long, tiring trip from their barracks in Japan to the front line in Korea.

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Leaving their barracks at 3 a.m. on July 1, they embarked on a fivehour truck ride through heavy rain to the airfield at Itasuki. There they boarded U.S. Air Force C-54 transport planes, which carried

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them across the Sea of Japan to an airstrip near Korea’s southern port city of Pusan. They stepped off the planes and onto Korean soil at 11 a.m. on July 1. For most of the men of Task Force Smith, Korea would be their introduction to combat. Some of them were cooks and clerks who had not been trained as infantrymen. The average age of the enlisted men in the unit was 20, too young to have fought in World War II, which had ended just five years earlier. On July 2, the Americans boarded railroad flatcars in Pusan that would carry them northward. As they waited to pull out, a train arrived, filled with refugees and soldiers just back from the front. The sight of the train provided one of Task Force Smith’s officers, 1st Lt. Philip Day, Jr., with his first inkling of the disasters of war that the Americans were to encounter. The train was covered with human beings—troops, officers, old men, women, children and most important, at least to me, wounded. My God, I thought, maybe there was a real war going on! Worse sights awaited them the farther north they traveled. As the train carrying Task Force Smith reached the town of Pyongtaek, it passed the wreckage of another South Korean train, bombed mistakenly by UN pilots who thought they were over North Korean–controlled territory. The corpses of hundreds of dead ROK soldiers and South Korean civilians lay strewn around. When the Americans got off the train and climbed into trucks heading north, they found the roads clogged with refugees and ROK soldiers desperately fleeing the communist advance. Nevertheless, the young American soldiers and their officers remained confident that once they reached the front they would turn the tide of battle. U.S. military commanders in Korea ordered Task Force Smith to block the path of the onrushing North Korean soldiers. Seoul, the capital of South Korea, had already fallen to the Communists, who were now heading southward along the Seoul-Pusan highway. The Americans would take up positions on a stretch of the highway about 50 miles south of Seoul, between the towns of Suwon and Osan. Lieutenant Colonel Smith had driven up ahead of his troops in a jeep to reconnoiter the area. Task Force Smith, reinforced by 108 artillerymen from the 52nd Field Artillery Battalion and six other 105-mm howitzers, followed their colonel northward by truck.

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a u.s. army field artillery battalion firing an eight-inch howitzer during a battle in korea (U.S. Army)

Smith picked out what he thought would be a good defensive position on three hills that overlooked the main road. His men arrived about 3 a.m. on July 5, their clothes soaked through from a cold drizzle. They moved into the hills to dig foxholes and dragged heavy boxes of ammunition up through the mud to their positions. “Everyone was tired, wet, cold, and a little bit pissed off,” Lieutenant Day would recall. The overcast skies also meant that the soldiers of Task Force Smith could expect no help from the U.S. Air Force if they got into trouble. Trouble was not long in coming. Shortly after dawn a sergeant called Day’s attention to a column of tanks moving down the road. Lieutenant Day, excited and unsure of what he was seeing, asked what they were. The sergeant replied calmly, “Those are T-34 tanks, sir, and I don’t think they’re going to be friendly toward us.” The artillerymen, who had set up their howitzers about a mile south of Smith’s infantrymen, zeroed in on the tanks. They fired the first American shots of the ground war in Korea at 8:16 a.m. on July 5, 1950. The infantrymen opened up with their 75-mm recoilless rifles, bazookas, and mortars. Although four North Korean tanks were knocked

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Two u.s. soldiers of the 24th infantry division are on alert in a trench in korea. (Getty Images)

out, many of the American shells, left over from World War II, turned out to be duds. The Americans began to take casualties in return. One North Korean crewman, abandoning his wrecked tank, fired his machine gun at Americans as he leapt to the ground. An American machine gunner fell dead before the enemy tankman was killed. The name of the dead American, the first U.S. death of the war, has been lost to history. Lieutenant Day, firing on the tanks with a 75-mm recoilless rifle, found himself a target of North Korean tank fire; his gun was destroyed and the concussion caused blood to pour from his ears. All the while the North Korean tanks kept rolling south. Within two hours after the fighting started, 29 tanks had passed by Task Force Smith, and 20 Americans had been killed or wounded. An hour later trucks carrying thousands of North Korean infantrymen rolled down the highway to the American positions. U.S. artillery fire blew up several trucks, killing dozens of NKPA soldiers. The rest climbed out of their trucks and began to encircle the Americans. Colonel

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Smith pulled his forces together into a tighter perimeter, and they fought back with rifles, grenades, and artillery. Many on both sides were killed. Finally, Colonel Smith was left with no choice but to withdraw or risk the destruction of his entire unit. The Americans had to abandon their wounded to the enemy. Some of the young soldiers panicked, throwing away their weapons so that they could travel faster. Lieutenant Day recalled: “We moved as fast as we could. Everything had broken down and it was every man for himself.” Colonel Smith and some of his men were able to break out of the enemy encirclement, but when the battle was done, more than 185 Americans had been killed, wounded, captured, or were missing. News of the destruction of Task Force Smith spread quickly through the ranks of American soldiers arriving in South Korea, undermining their morale. Things had not worked out the way the planners in Tokyo and Washington thought they would. All in all, it was an unpromising beginning for the first full-scale American war on the Asian mainland, a conflict that Gen. Omar N. Bradley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, would in the spring of 1951 call the “wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Task Force Smith never really had a chance. The unit was in part the victim of an arrogant miscalculation by U.S. military commanders, a presumption that the North Koreans would never stand and fight against Americans. But the soldiers of Task Force Smith were also victims of the uncertainty and confusion in American foreign policy in Asia since the end of the World War II. Between 1945 and 1950, the U.S. government committed itself to the struggle to stop communism wherever it threatened to spread—a struggle that became known as the cold war. Yet neither the leaders of the American government nor the American people as a whole seemed to realize, or were willing to pay, the true costs of a policy of anticommunist “containment” on a worldwide scale. The U.S. government and military had spent five years getting ready to fight a World War II–style conflict on the European continent. That would have been the “right” war, in terms of American expectations and preparation. A limited war in Asia was another matter altogether. Yet the Korean War would mark a dividing line in American history. It was the moment when the U.S. truly became a superpower, displaying the will and developing the means for global intervention. With the end of World War II in 1945, the wartime Grand Alliance of the United States and the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany

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a u.s. truck convoy crossing the naktong river passes a knocked-out T-34 tank made in ussr. (U.S. Army Military History Institute)

collapsed. President Franklin Roosevelt had hoped that the United States and the Soviets could cooperate in guaranteeing the peace and stability of the postwar international order. But when Soviet leader Joseph Stalin imposed a system of puppet communist regimes on the countries of Eastern and central Europe, the bright hopes of postwar friendship faded. The United States strengthened the defenses of Western Europe against further Soviet advances. George Kennan, an American foreign service officer in the U.S. embassy in Moscow, sent a long telegram to the State Department in February 1946, analyzing postwar Soviet policies. In an expanded version of his telegram, printed in the influential journal Foreign Affairs in 1947, Kennan warned of the hostility of the Soviet leadership to the Western world and their determination to spread the communist system beyond its present borders. In what became known as the “containment doctrine,” Kennan declared: In these circumstances, it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a

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long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies. President Harry Truman agreed with Kennan. (Truman had been Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president and had become president after Roosevelt’s death in April 1945.) On March 12, 1947, he made a speech to Congress calling for the extension of U.S. economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey, to aid their resistance to communism. Truman told Congress, in what became known as the Truman Doctrine, that it “must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Congress approved aid to Greece and Turkey and also voted for the Marshall Plan, an ambitious foreign aid program providing funds to help rebuild the war-shattered economies of Western Europe. And in 1949 the Senate ratified a treaty establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), committing the United States to the continued military defense of Western Europe.

JApAn Forward Base for the U.S. War Effort among the crucial factors that allowed the united states to halt the north korean advance in the summer of 1950 was the fact that the Japanese port of sasebo was only 165 nautical miles away from the south korean port of Pusan. since Japan’s surrender and occupation in september 1945, the united states had maintained an extensive series of military bases in the country. american occupation troops and supplies already located in Japan could thus be rushed by ship or plane to korea in the crucial days and weeks following the north korean invasion. Japan served as headquarters for the un command, under gen. douglas Macarthur, and throughout the war functioned as an advanced staging base for the u.s. military. wounded un servicemen were sent to military hospitals in Japan. although the Japanese were not permitted to maintain their own armed forces and took no direct role in the fighting, Japanese guards at u.s. military installations freed up u.s. soldiers for fighting in korea, while Japanese sailors were recruited to operate minesweepers and landing craft in korean waters.

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Yet the old isolationist habits that had shaped American policy since the earliest days of the republic were far from dead and buried in the late 1940s. Many Americans still wanted to isolate their country from “foreign entanglements,” as George Washington had advised. The open-ended pledge to defend the “free world” against communism was more rhetorical than real. Sheltered between two great oceans, Americans were used to staying out of foreign wars; once forced to fight, they preferred to disband and disarm their armies as quickly as possible when the guns were silent. The aftermath of World War II was no exception. U.S. military forces shrank from 12 million men in 1945 to just 1.6 million in 1947. Annual military spending over the same period shrank from $82 billion to $13 billion. These cutbacks still left the U.S. military a much more powerful force than it had been on the eve of the World War II. And U.S. government leaders hoped that their monopoly on the atomic bomb, which had been used with decisive effect against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, would ensure American power. Although the United States maintained major bases in Japan, Hawaii, and the Philippines, the great bulk of U.S. military forces overseas were stationed in Europe. Yet it was in Asia that the Communists were making some of their greatest advances in the years after World War II. In Vietnam, a French colony, a guerrilla war led by the Communist Ho Chi Minh challenged the continued rule of the colonialists. At the same time in China, Communist armies led by Mao Zedong were on the verge of overthrowing the government of the country’s anticommunist leader, Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jeshi). The Truman administration left the fighting in Vietnam for the moment to the French. In China the United States provided several billion dollars’ worth of military aid to Chiang Kai-shek but carefully avoided any direct involvement of U.S. military forces. While some Americans felt strongly that the United States should be doing more to defeat the communists in Asia, neither the Democratic president Harry Truman, nor his Republican critics in Congress, showed any enthusiasm for raising taxes to pay for greater military spending. In 1949, two events shook Americans’ self-confidence in their ability to triumph in the cold war: The Chinese Communists defeated Chiang Kai-shek’s forces, driving them from the mainland into exile on the large offshore island of Taiwan, and the Soviet Union exploded its own atomic bomb. Early in 1950 President Truman authorized officials

Task Force Smith

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from the State and Defense Departments to study the threat to American interests in the world. The result was a top-secret study known as NSC-68 (NSC means National Security Council, the government body that advises the president on foreign policy issues). It warned that American credibility in world affairs had been seriously shaken by the fall of China and the end of the U.S. monopoly on the atomic bomb. No more setbacks could be allowed in any corner of the globe because “the assault on free institutions is worldwide now, and . . . a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere.” The United States had thought about the Soviet-American conflict chiefly in terms of an all-out war with the Soviet Union, a war centered on the European continent. But it had to prepare to fight limited wars in many other parts of the world. To make this strategy possible, NSC68 called for a tripling of the defense budget to finance a vast expansion of American nuclear and conventional forces. In May 1950, in line with the recommendations of NSC-68, Truman extended U.S. military aid to the French war effort in Vietnam. But it was by no means certain that proposals for such a huge increase in defense spending could get through a budget-conscious Congress. The Korean War changed all that. When North Korean forces attacked in June 1950, American policy makers believed the war signaled the start of a full-scale war with the Soviet Union and its allies. Margaret Truman, the president’s daughter, was with him in their home in Independence, Missouri, when he received the news of the invasion. “My father made it clear,” she recalled, “from the moment he heard the news, that he feared this was the opening round in World War Three.” By August, according to public opinion polls, a majority of Americans agreed that the fighting in Korea was in fact the start of a third world war. Over the next three years, while Americans fought, bled, and died in Korea, the United States rearmed and reshaped its foreign policy. For the men of Task Force Smith and thousands of others flung into combat into Korea in the next few months, the renewed emphasis on American military preparedness came too late.

2

  Today there are two Koreas: the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea). For more than 1,000 years before the 21st century, Korea was one undivided country. The present border shared by the two Koreas runs through the middle of the Korean Peninsula. The border dips to the south of the 38th parallel along its western edge and rises slightly to the north of the 38th parallel as it moves eastward from the town of Panmunjom. It was in Panmunjom that an agreement was reached in 1953 ending the Korean War after three bloody years of fighting. The cease-fire line, which marked the positions held by the two opposing sides, became the border between North and South Korea. Heavily armed soldiers have kept careful watch along both sides of that border ever since 1953, a constant reminder that this is a political, not a geographic, boundary line. Much of Korea’s history, for better or worse, has been shaped by the country’s geographic location. The Korean Peninsula juts southward about 600 miles from the Asian mainland, dividing the Sea of Japan on its eastern shore from the shallow Yellow Sea on its western shore. The peninsula is a small area of about 85,000 square miles, or roughly the same size as Minnesota. At its widest, the peninsula is less than 200 miles across, and at its narrowest it is less than 100 miles across. A number of small islands lie off its shores. The interior of the Korean Peninsula consists mainly of rugged hills and mountains. Mountains run the length of the peninsula, with the highest peak more than 9,000 feet in elevation. The Taebaek Mountains cut off a large part of the eastern coast from the western half of the peninsula. Because of the barren mountain terrain, most human settlement and agricultural cultivation is restricted to the river val14

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leys and coastal plains, which make up a fifth of the peninsula’s land area. Korea’s climate is harsh: Long, cold winters are followed by hot and humid summers. The soil is poor, except in the intensively fertilized rice paddies or in fields where farmers grow wheat, millet, barley, and some cotton. The northern half of the peninsula has some natural resources to offer, including deposits of coal and iron ore. Koreans are an ancient people. The modern inhabitants of Korea are descendants of migrants from Manchuria and Mongolia who traveled southward in about 3000 b.c. Historians disagree as to the beginning of Korea as a separate country, but some date its origins to 1123 b.c., when a Chinese prince named Chi-tzu came from China with 5,000 followers and established his rule in a kingdom located in the area of present-day Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea. Known in ancient times as Choson (or “Land of the Morning Calm”), Korea was divided into warring kingdoms until the seventh century a.d. A politically unified state first emerged in a.d. 676 under a kingdom known as Silla. In a.d. 935 another of the warring kingdoms of earlier centuries, known as Koguryo, or Koryo, gained control of the peninsula. It was from Koryo that the English word Korea was derived. Korean independence proved precarious, since the country lies so near the great powers of East Asia. On its northern border, Korea is separated from Manchuria (China’s northeastern province) by the Yalu River. Russia (known from 1917 to 1991 as the Soviet Union) shares a small stretch of Korea’s northern border. The northern tip of Korea is only 90 miles south from the Russian port of Vladivostok. To the east, a short sea journey of 120 miles separates southern Korea from Japan. As a result the Korean Peninsula has acted, historically, as a natural land bridge between the powers of the Asian mainland and the Japanese. Through much of Korea’s history, China was the dominant power in the region. The Korean language, economy, political system, and religion (a mixture of Buddhism and Confucianism) bear the imprint of Chinese influence. The Chinese sometimes ruled Korea directly, other times indirectly. They regarded the Koreans as a “younger brother.” But throughout 1,000 years of Chinese influence, the Koreans maintained a sense of their own separate national identity. When they had any say in the matter, Koreans shunned contact with foreigners. The country became known as the “hermit kingdom” for its isolation. Koreans could not maintain their isolation in the face of pressures from more powerful neighbors. The Mongols invaded the country in

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officers and crew of the uss Monocacy stand on deck, korea, June 1871 (National Archives/Department of Defense)

the 13th century, and the Japanese in the 16th century. In the 19th century, merchants and missionaries from Western countries began to appear, though the Koreans at first would have nothing to do with them. When a U.S. merchant ship put in to the Taedong River near Pyongyang in 1866, seeking to open trade with the Koreans, the local population massacred its crew. In 1871, in a belated act of retaliation, a U.S. naval squadron bombarded the forts guarding the entrance to the Han River. The Japanese were the most persistent of those seeking entry into Korea, forcing Koreans to open ports to their merchants in the 1870s. To counter the growing Japanese influence, Korea signed a series of treaties opening trade with Western powers, including one with the United States in 1882. In the late 19th century, the Japanese were beginning to develop a powerful and far-flung empire, extending their influence into Taiwan (a large island off the shore of southeast China), into southern Manchuria, and into Korea. China was a weak and divided country at this time and was easily defeated by Japan in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95,

Background to War

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a war fought in part over the question of which country would control Korea. The Japanese government sent troops to occupy Seoul in 1894 to protect Japanese interests. Japan then bested its remaining military rival in the region, czarist Russia, in a war in 1905. The growth of Japanese power spelled doom for Korea’s independence. In 1909 a high Japanese official in Korea was assassinated by a Korean nationalist; in response the Japanese annexed the country in 1910. For the next 35 years, Korea was ruled from Tokyo. The Japanese looked down on the Koreans and treated them harshly. Although Korea benefited from the roads, railroads, ports, and dams built by the Japanese, most of the profits were carried off to Japan. The Japanese seized land from Korean peasants and used the country as a source of raw materials, cheap labor, and conscript soldiers. When students launched an independence movement on March 1, 1919, Japanese authorities responded with a bloody crackdown, killing close to 7,000 people and arresting thousands more. In memory of those events, March 1 is still

This 1904 print shows a Japanese officer reading a document to captured russian soldiers in korea during the russo-Japanese war. By defeating the russians, the Japanese solidified their hold on korea, finally annexing the country in 1910. (Library of Congress)

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observed in South Korea as Independence Movement Day. Some Koreans collaborated with their Japanese rulers; Korean members of the Japanese-organized national police force were especially feared and hated by other Koreans for their brutality. Koreans never lost hope that they would one day regain their independence. Opposition movements soon sprang up against Japanese rule. One was led by a man named Syngman Rhee. Rhee was born in 1875, the son of a Korean scholar. He was thrown in jail for antigovernment activities in 1898. Following his release from prison in 1904, Rhee went to the United States, where he studied at Princeton University, receiving a Ph.D. in international law. A convert to Christianity, Rhee returned to Korea in 1910 to work for the Christian Youth movement. Suspected by the Japanese of pro-independence activities, Rhee escaped from Korea before he could be arrested. He would not return for more than three decades. At a meeting of Korean exiles in Shanghai in 1919, a Korean Provisional Government was established, with Rhee

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as its president. Rhee’s “government” had no real power, and Rhee continued to have many rivals among Korean exiles for leadership of the independence movement. Many Korean nationalists disliked Rhee for his arrogance and distrusted his personal ambitions. But Rhee enjoyed the support of influential American backers, particularly Christian missionaries. Through all his long years of exile, he worked ceaselessly to win the backing of the U.S. government for an independent Korea under his leadership. The Communists proved to be Rhee’s most dangerous rivals in the Korean independence movement. In 1917, communists had launched a successful revolution in Russia. They called for a world revolution against capitalism and colonialism and found followers in many countries. China developed its own powerful communist movement in the 1920s and 1930s. Many Koreans lived in Siberia and in Manchuria. Some, swept up in the Russian and Chinese revolutions, became communists. Communists inside Korea risked torture and execution at the hands of the Japanese if they were captured. In Manchuria, Korean communists fought alongside Chinese Communists in the guerrilla war against the Japanese, who had set up a puppet regime there in the early 1930s. One of the Communist leaders who emerged from the Manchurian fighting was a man known as Kim Il Sung. Few details are known about his early life. He was born in a peasant family near the city of Pyongyang in 1912. He attended school in Manchuria, where he joined the communist movement, and began fighting with the guerrillas in 1932. In 1941, he moved to Khabarovsk in the Soviet Far East, where he and his men joined the Soviet Red Army. His activities and whereabouts during the World War II are unknown, but at the end of the war he was with the Soviets as they prepared to attack the Japanese. North Korean propaganda would later invent unlikely tales of Kim’s glorious deeds in the anti-Japanese struggle, but there is no question that he was a hardened and experienced guerrilla fighter. When Americans remember World War II in the Pacific, they usually think in terms of the “island-hopping” campaigns (Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Okinawa) and the great naval battles (Midway, Coral Sea, Leyte Gulf). But there was another part of the war that the United States had little to do with. Throughout the war, much of the Japanese army was tied down in the battle for control of China. As U.S. military planners prepared to invade the Japanese home islands in the last stage

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Korean War

of the war, they feared that this huge reserve force could be brought home to resist the Americans. It was expected that hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers and marines would lose their lives in the invasion of Japan, if the Japanese continued to resist to the last man, as they had on many Pacific islands. So U.S. strategists, including the U.S. military commander in the Pacific, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, were eager to draw the Soviet Union into the war. If the Red Army could sweep down from Siberia into Manchuria and engage the Japanese forces there, the U.S. invasion of Japan would be less costly. At a meeting of Allied leaders in the Soviet city of Yalta in February 1945, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin assured President Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill that his country would enter the war against Japan three months after the end of the fighting against the Nazis in Europe. At the time they secured this agreement with Stalin, Roosevelt and U.S. strategists had not known whether the top-secret project to construct an atomic bomb, or A-bomb, would prove successful. In July 1945, U.S. scientists successfully tested an A-bomb in the Nevada desert. On August 6, a U.S. plane dropped an A-bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The Japanese sued for peace a few days later. But in the meantime, on August 8, three months to the day after the Nazi surrender of May 8, Soviet armies attacked the Japanese in Manchuria. In their wartime meetings, the leaders of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain had devoted a great deal of time to discussing postwar borders and the political future of the liberated countries of Europe. They paid relatively little attention to other parts of the world where their armies were fighting. At the Yalta Conference in 1945, Roosevelt proposed that some sort of “trusteeship” be set up to rule over Korea after the war. Stalin agreed, though he said he hoped the period of trusteeship would be a short one. Plans for Korea’s future remained vague. U.S. and Soviet military strategists agreed that, once the Red Army entered the war against the Japanese, it would continue its drive into Korea. By mid-August 1945, U.S. policy makers were having second thoughts. They did not want Korea turned into an outpost of Soviet power after the war. To forestall the possibility that the Russians would simply take over all of Korea, they decided to land U.S. troops at the port of Inchon on Korea’s western coast and have them move north to meet the Soviets midway up the peninsula. The two armies would meet

Background to War

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Soviet nucleAr weAponS Why the Korean War Did Not Involve Atomic Warfare in a 1997 book reevaluating cold war history entitled We Now Know, John Lewis gaddis writes: “The taboo on the use of nuclear weapons in limited wars—indeed the very notion of a ‘limited’ war itself—had not yet taken root [in 1950]; the korean war defined these principles, but there was little reason to expect, when it broke out, that its conduct would reflect them.” u.s. military commanders gave serious consideration to the use of nuclear weapons to stem the chinese advance, and President Truman publicly threatened their use on one occasion. one of the things about which it cannot be said “we now know” is the extent to which soviet possession of the atomic bomb acted as a deterrent to u.s. use of such weapons. The soviet union exploded its first nuclear device in the summer of 1949 and had only a few nuclear weapons on hand when the war began. The united states, a nuclear power since 1945, had about 200 bombs in its nuclear arsenal. nor did the soviets have any means of delivering a nuclear weapon against the united states, while u.s. long-range bombers were well-positioned to strike soviet cities. The nuclear balance favored the united states. and yet, had a u.s. nuclear bomb been dropped on chinese forces in korea or in Manchuria, the soviets could have launched a devastating retaliatory strike. soviet bombers based in Manchuria could have easily hit the Pusan port area, which would have resulted in tens of thousands of u.s. casualties and millions of korean deaths. one of the things now known is that the korean war set off a nuclear arms race between the rival superpowers; by war’s end the united states had 800 bombs in its arsenal, the soviet union, 200.

along the 38th parallel, which ran about 25 miles north of Inchon and the inland Korean capital of Seoul. In 1945, 9 million Koreans lived north of this line, while 21 million lived south of it. Most of Korea’s industry was concentrated north of the line, and most of its agricultural land lay south of it. Until plans could be worked out for an independent, unified Korean government, the Americans and the Soviets would set up occupation governments in the two zones of the country. These plans were similar to those that had been worked out earlier for

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the postwar occupation of Germany. The difference was that Korea was supposed to be a “liberated” rather than a “defeated” country. Many Koreans resented the fact that the 35-year occupation of their country by one foreign army, the Japanese, was followed immediately by occupation by two new foreign armies. At first the occupation of Korea went smoothly. Although the Red Army arrived in the country a month before the Americans, the Russians halted their advance, as agreed, at the 38th parallel. U.S. troops under the command of Lt. Gen. John R. Hodge landed at Inchon on September 8, 1945. They marched to Seoul the next day, where they accepted the surrender of the Japanese. The Koreans cheered the arrival of the Americans. But Hodge, a tough and undiplomatic veteran of the fighting on Guadalcanal and Okinawa, angered many Koreans when he decided to leave the Japanese colonial government in power until other arrangements could be made to maintain law and order. After 35 years, even a few more weeks of Japanese rule seemed intolerable. Although Hodge’s policy was soon reversed on orders from Washington, it gave a good indication of U.S. priorities in Korea, which emphasized political stability rather than Korean self-determination. As the cold war intensified in the months after Japan’s surrender, the chances for peacefully reuniting the two Korean occupation zones became increasingly unlikely. In the northern half of Korea, Kim Il Sung’s Communists created a government and society along the Soviet model. They divided up the big landholding estates and redistributed land to the peasants, which was a popular move. At the same time they stamped out all opposition to Communist rule, arresting and imprisoning their opponents. In the southern half of Korea General Hodge, who would remain the U.S. military governor in Korea for four years, was determined to keep the Communists from gaining power. He allied the United States with the most conservative political groups in southern Korea, including those which had collaborated with the Japanese. He ordered the disbanding of the “people’s committees,” set up after the war by Communists and other independence groups in many Korean cities, as well as communist-influenced labor unions. The Korean national police force arrested and killed thousands of Communists and other opponents of the U.S. military government. Hodge was on hand to welcome Syngman Rhee back from his long exile in October 1945. U.S. relations with Rhee over the next few years

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proved stormy, for the cantankerous old man had a mind of his own. “President Syngman Rhee is a man of strong convictions and has little patience with those who differ with him,” President Truman recalled in his memoirs. “I did not care for the methods used by Rhee’s police to break up political meetings and control political enemies.” But in the end Truman decided Rhee was the best available candidate to stiffen the resistance of the anticommunist forces in the South. American military leaders were not at all enthusiastic about the prospect of tying up tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers on indefinite occupation duty in southern Korea. Preoccupied with the possibility of war breaking out in Europe against Soviet forces, they regarded the Korean Peninsula as a drain on scarce resources, with little strategic significance of its own. The Pentagon pushed for the earliest possible withdrawal from South Korea. The Soviets would pull out their own forces from northern Korea in 1948, leaving behind a large and well equipped North Korean army. However, several thousand Soviet soldiers remained behind as military advisers. Others in the government were equally determined to maintain a strong U.S. presence in Korea. In September 1946, a half-year before the declaration of the Truman Doctrine, U.S. presidential aide Clark Clifford in a report to the president identified Korea as one of the “trouble spots” where the United States should be prepared to confront the threat of Soviet expansionism. The U.S. State Department argued against any quick withdrawal of U.S. forces from southern Korea, believing that such action would be an invitation for a Communist takeover or invasion. In May 1948 the United Nations, at the request of the United States and over the objections of the Soviet Union, organized parliamentary elections in South Korea. North Korea refused to participate, and communists in South Korea called for a boycott of the elections. The new South Korean National Assembly elected Syngman Rhee as its chairman and in July adopted a constitution establishing the Republic of Korea in the South. General MacArthur made a rare trip away from his headquarters in Japan to attend Rhee’s inauguration in Seoul. Rhee clamped down on critics of his regime, arresting almost 90,000 people between the fall of 1948 and the spring of 1949. North Korea’s Communists responded to the events in the South by setting up their own government, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), in July 1948. U.S. occupation of Korea formally ended in August 1948.

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Kim il Sung’S 1949–1950 converSAtionS with StAlin The opening of soviet diplomatic archives in the 1990s shed new light on the origins of the korean war. The initiative for the north korean attack on south korea came from north korean leader kim il sung, who over a period of months in 1949–50 won over a skeptical Joseph stalin to support the invasion plan. kim first broached the topic during a meeting with stalin in Moscow in the spring of 1949. as late as January 1950, stalin remained unpersuaded, although he did approve stepped-up military assistance to north korea. “i understand the dissatisfaction of comrade kim il sung,” he cabled the soviet ambassador in Pyongyang, “but he must understand that such a large matter in regard to south korea such as he wants to undertake needs large preparation. The matter must be organized so that there would not be too great a risk.” The risk that stalin feared the most was the possibility of a direct military confrontation with the united states. stalin did not reveal his intentions to chinese communist leader Mao Zedong, whom he met in Moscow in February 1950. Mao would complain several years later to the soviet ambassador to china that “when i was in Moscow there was no talk about conquering south korea. . . . But afterwards kim il sung was in Moscow, where a certain agreement was reached about which nobody deemed it necessary to consult with me beforehand.” The “certain agreement” Mao referred to was reached when kim returned to Moscow in april 1950. while approving the invasion, a still cautious stalin warned kim that “if you should get kicked in the teeth,” he could not expect to be bailed out militarily by the soviet union. kim would have to turn for help to china instead.

Apart from a few hundred U.S. military advisers (known as the Korean Military Advisory Group, or KMAG), all U.S. troops had been withdrawn from South Korea by the end of June 1949. Neither the South Koreans under Syngman Rhee nor the North Koreans under Kim Il Sung recognized the legitimacy of the other’s government. Fighting frequently broke out on the border between the two countries, with small groups launching raids against each other’s

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syngman rhee (1875–1965), newly elected chairman of the republic of korea’s national assembly, delivers the opening address at its first meeting on May 31, 1948. (U.S. Army Military History Institute)

lines. Rhee made his U.S. allies nervous by repeatedly announcing his intention to march on the North and unify all of Korea under his own leadership. As a result, the United States restricted the kinds of aid it provided the new ROK army. The South Koreans were given small arms, light artillery, and tons of ammunition but no tanks or aircraft. The United States wanted to see the ROK forces strong enough to repel a North Korean attack but too weak to launch an offensive of their own. Kim Il Sung faced no such restrictions in building up his own military forces. By the spring of 1950, North Korea had 135,000 soldiers, many of them battle-hardened veterans of the fighting in Manchuria during the Chinese Revolution and they were equipped with Soviet T-34 tanks and heavy artillery. The South Koreans had fewer than half as many soldiers. In the five years that followed the World War II, Korea was a country at war with itself. In those years, as many as 100,000 Koreans died in the fighting between Kim Il Sung and Syngman Rhee’s

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sympathizers. This bloody “peace” came to an end shortly before dawn on Sunday, June 25, 1950, when ROK lines along the 38th parallel came under a heavy artillery barrage. Within hours, North Korean tanks and infantry had broken through South Korean lines and were on their way to Seoul. The Korean War had begun. Task Force Smith would soon be on its way to the front.

3

           It was against this background, drawing on these historical roots, that the North Korean People’s Army (NKPA) unleashed a devastating artillery barrage across the 38th parallel in those predawn hours of June 25, 1950. Within days, Task Force Smith would be thrown into the front lines. But long before they could be on the scene, immediately after the artillery barrage lifted, some 90,000 NKPA soldiers, supported by more than 100 fighter planes and 150 tanks, poured across the border into South Korea. As Republic of Korea (ROK) defenses broke in the onslaught of the first few hours, North Korean leader Kim Il Sung spoke to his people on the radio. He claimed it was South Korea that had invaded the North, and that NKPA soldiers were merely responding to the aggression of the “bandit traitor Syngman Rhee.” As soon as he learned of the attack, the U.S. ambassador to South Korea sent a coded cable to Washington. “According to Korean army reports,” the cable said, “North Korean forces invaded the Republic of Korea territory at several points this morning . . . It would appear from the nature of the attack and the manner in which it was launched that it constitutes an all-out offensive against the Republic of Korea.” It was late at night on the evening of June 24, Washington, D.C., time, when the cable arrived and was decoded in the State Department. No one in the State Department or the Pentagon had been expecting trouble to break out so soon in Korea. U.S. intelligence reports in the weeks preceding June 25 failed to note any special military preparations by North Korea. U.S. president Harry Truman was not even in Washington to receive the news. He was relaxing at his family home in Independence, Missouri, when he was called that night by Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Acheson suggested to the president that the United States call for a special meeting of the UN Security Council to 27

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Korean War

This idealized portrait by a north korean artist depicts the north korean dictator kim il sung (1912–94) leading and inspiring his troops at the front during the korean war. (The Bridgeman Art Library)

discuss the attack. It was the United Nations, after all, that had created the Republic of Korea just two years earlier. Truman and Acheson’s decision to turn to the United Nations would have great significance in shaping the coming war. In Tokyo General MacArthur learned of the attack soon after it began. He told John Foster Dulles, a prominent Republican leader who was there on a special diplomatic mission for the president, that “If Washington only will not hobble me, I can handle [the invasion] with one arm tied behind my back.” Dulles cabled Acheson, urging U.S. intervention. Syngman Rhee sent his own message to Truman asking for aid. There had never been a U.S. commitment to go to war to defend South Korea. In fact, in a speech to the National Press Club in Washington the previous January, Secretary of State Acheson had described the “defense line” the United States was committed to defending in the Pacific in such a way that it seemed to exclude South Korea altogether. Republicans later charged that Acheson’s speech in January had encouraged Kim Il Sung’s decision to invade in June, conveniently ignoring the fact that in January many Republican congressmen had cast their votes to help defeat a Korean aid bill proposed by the Tru-

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man administration. The Pentagon’s contingency plans in the event of a North Korean invasion called for the withdrawal of U.S. military and diplomatic personnel from South Korea, rather than fighting it out with invading communists. Bad news from Korea continued to pour into Washington all day Sunday, June 25 (June 26 in Korea). While Truman prepared to leave Independence, Missouri, Sunday afternoon, the UN Security Council met in Lake Success, New York, to debate the U.S. resolution on the North Korean invasion. (The United Nations had not yet moved into its present, permanent headquarters in New York City.) The UN Security Council was made up of delegates from five permanent member countries (Britain, France, China, the United States, the Soviet Union) and delegates from six other nations. Any one of the permanent members of the Security Council had the right to veto a resolution that came before the council. The Soviet delegate, who ordinarily could have been expected to veto the U.S. resolution condemning North Korea, was absent that Sunday. The Soviets had been boycotting meetings of the UN Security Council since January 1950 to protest the exclusion of Communist China from UN membership. As a result, the UN Security Council voted 9-0, with Yugoslavia abstaining, to call for the immediate withdrawal of North Korean forces from South Korea. The Soviet absence from the Security Council should have raised doubts in Washington’s mind about Moscow’s intentions. If this was a carefully planned blow—and perhaps the start of a much larger war— then why had not Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered his diplomats to attend the Security Council meetings? (The Soviet delegate would finally return to the Security Council on August 1, too late to undo the earlier UN resolutions on Korea.) The fumbling Soviet diplomatic response to the invasion suggests how little thought Stalin had given to the war and its consequences. On his flight back to Washington on June 25, Truman recalled in his memoirs, he thought long and hard about how the United States should respond to the North Korean aggression. He was reminded of the events leading up to World War II: In my generation, this was not the first occasion when the strong had attacked the weak. I recalled some earlier instances: Manchuria, Ethiopia, Austria. I remembered how each time that the democracies failed to act, it had encouraged the

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Korean War aggressors to keep going ahead. Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese had acted . . . If this were allowed to go unchallenged it would mean a third World War, just as similar incidents had brought on the Second World War.

But it was not just the memories of World War II that shaped Truman’s response. American policy makers were already inclined to intervene to stop the spread of communism before the news arrived from Korea, as the National Security Council’s secret report NSC-68 indicates. And Truman had not forgotten the attacks on his administration by Republicans for having “lost” China the previous year to the Communists. He had no intention of seeing his presidency utterly wrecked by now losing Korea as well. For all these reasons, Truman felt that the moment had come for decisive action. He made a series of decisions over the next few

a member of the korean Military advisory group (kMag) and his interpreter (right) instruct a republic of korea (rok) army 60-mm mortar crew. (U.S. Army Military History Institute)

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days committing the United States to confronting the Communists in Korea, and throughout Asia if necessary. At a meeting with his national security advisers on Sunday evening, June 25, Truman authorized the use of U.S. air and naval units to attack North Koreans south of the 38th parallel. On Monday, June 26, he ordered the U.S. Seventh Fleet into the Formosa Strait, the waters that separated the Communist Chinese mainland from the Nationalist Chinese island of Formosa. Truman also decided to increase U.S. military aid to the French forces fighting in Indochina. On Tuesday, June 27, he ordered the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations to propose a new resolution to the Security Council calling for member nations to provide aid to South Korea to resist North Korea’s aggression. The Security Council voted late Tuesday evening, with the Soviet Union still absent, to “furnish such assistance . . . as may be necessary to repel the armed attack and to restore international peace and security in the area.” That same day, Truman briefed congressional leaders on the situation in South Korea and his own decisions since the start of the invasion. Although committing the United States to military action, Truman carefully avoided saying that the United States was going to war in Korea. Truman’s decision to go to war solely on his own authority as commander in chief of U.S. forces came under harsh criticism from Republican critics in Congress, who accused him of ignoring Congress’s constitutional right to declare war. Truman hoped to sidestep the issue by calling U.S. involvement a “police action” rather than a war. This was the United States’s first major undeclared foreign war. It was also the first war it fought under a flag other than its own—the blue banner of the United Nations. On July 7, the UN Security Council voted to establish a United Nations command to coordinate military efforts in defense of South Korea. In recognition of the fact that the United States was doing most of the fighting in the war, Truman was authorized to appoint the commander of UN forces. Truman appointed MacArthur to the post on July 8. Six days later Syngman Rhee placed ROK forces under MacArthur’s command. For the moment, apart from some air support from the Australians, the U.S. and ROK soldiers fought alone, but within months soldiers from 15 nations, including Britain and the British Commonwealth, France, Turkey, Greece, and Thailand had joined the Americans in Korea. Several nations, including Britain and

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A JuSt wAr? Thinkers on international law since st. augustine (354–430) and st. Thomas aquinas (1225–74) have developed seven principles or considerations to determine whether a war is “just” or legitimate. americans have debated their role in the korean war in these terms. 1. a just war must be authorized by a legitimate authority. Proponents: The united nations condemned north korea’s invasion of south korea and authorized the use of force by member nations to repel the aggressors. Opponents: The korean war was the first major war fought by the united states beyond its own shores where the president failed to ask congress for a declaration of war. The un resolution provided authority only to repel north korean aggressors from south korea; carrying the war across the 38th parallel into north korea was not authorized and led to more than two additional years of unnecessary bloodshed. 2. a just war can only be fought if it is started with right intentions, such as to redress a wrong. Proponents: north korea launched an unprovoked assault on south korea. Opponents: a state of civil war existed between north and south korea for several years before the north korean invasion, with both sides guilty of aggressive acts. 3. a war cannot be justified if its chances of success are low and it appears that it will drag on for an extended period. Proponents: The united states and its allies had the economic and military resources required to wage a successful and short-term war to repel north korea’s aggression. Opponents: The likelihood of chinese intervention made the u.s. decision to press the war into north korea a very risky venture. 4. The damage of the war must be proportional to the injury suffered.

Australia, sent naval units to support the efforts of the U.S. fleet off Korea’s shores. In South Korea the situation had been growing more desperate by the hour. The NKPA reached the outskirts of Seoul on Tuesday, June 27. Syngman Rhee and the South Korean government, along with

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Proponents: The united states would use sufficient force to achieve the unconditional surrender of its enemies but did not seek to destroy their societies or cause unnecessary casualties among enemy civilian populations. Opponents: The united states waged a ruthless war of terror against the civilian population of north korea, destroying cities and wrecking the north korean infrastructure. Moreover, american troops were involved in massacres of south korean civilians who had the misfortune of being in the wrong place and the wrong time. 5. a just war should be waged only as a last resort. Proponents: if the united states had not intervened in June 1950, the north korean military would have completed its conquest of south korea in a matter of weeks. Opponents: The united states had no business interfering in what was essentially a civil war between korean factions. 6. The real reason for the war should show right intent and should be the stated reason. Proponents: The united states sought to repel aggression and restore self-determination to its ally south korea. Opponents: under the banner of collective security against aggression and for self-determination, the united states was shoring up an authoritarian government in south korea, while securing its own sphere of influence in asia. 7. The goal of a just war should be to reestablish peace. The peace established after the war should be better than the peace that would exist if the war were not fought. Proponents: By rolling back north korean aggression, the united states allowed south korea to develop into a prosperous democracy. Opponents: More than a half century after the end of the korean war, korea remains divided and a potential flashpoint for nuclear war.

U.S. embassy personnel and military advisers, headed south to avoid capture. The ROK troops fighting a rearguard action in the city were poorly led and disorganized. Thousands of them were cut off from retreat on the early morning of June 28, when a panicky ROK officer prematurely blew up the bridge spanning the Han River south of the

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This view from the bow shows the uss Missouri firing its 16-inch guns at installations in north korea. north korea had no navy capable of interfering with such actions. (Corbis)

city. Hundreds of civilians and soldiers who were crossing the bridge when it was blown were killed in the explosion. On June 29, Truman, on the urging of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), authorized U.S. air and naval strikes north of the 38th parallel. The same day MacArthur made his inspection trip to South Korea and cabled the request to Washington that led to the decision to dispatch Task Force Smith. The first U.S. soldiers ever to confront an Asian communist army on the ground were on their way to the front on July 1, in what General MacArthur hoped would prove to be an “arrogant display of strength.” While MacArthur, as supreme commander of UN forces, made his decisions from his headquarters in Tokyo, he dispatched subordinate officers to take command on the ground in Korea. Beginning with his arrival on July 12, the senior U.S. commander in Korea was Lt. Gen. Walton A. Walker, a highly regarded combat veteran of both World War I and II who had served as commander of the U.S. Eighth Army in Japan since 1948. Walker took command in Korea on his arrival on July 12. As Walker’s troops arrived in Korea, they became known as the Eighth U.S. Army, Korea, or EUSAK.

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The first U.S. unit to fight in Korea was the army’s 24th Infantry Division, including the men of Task Force Smith and the 21st and 34th Infantry Regiments. In three weeks of heavy fighting in July, the 24th would be battered and decimated by the North Koreans. The only thing the Americans could do in the short run in Korea was to trade space for time, delaying the enemy’s advance down the peninsula as long as possible while more troops and equipment unloaded from ships and planes in the southern port city of Pusan. The 24th Division was under the command of Maj. Gen. William F. Dean, a hefty six-footer and decorated combat veteran of World War II. Dean had served as U.S. military governor in South Korea for a year in the late 1940s, before assuming command of the 24th Infantry Division in Japan in 1949. While Task Force Smith was being swept aside, Dean’s forces took up positions farther south, along the road from Seoul. The men of the 34th Infantry Regiment were the next to learn just what a formidable enemy the North Koreans could be. They were not ready for battle. Their artillery support was still being unloaded from ships in Pusan when they took their positions two miles north of Pyongtaek and about 10 miles south of Task Force Smith’s position. Some of the men of the 34th had not yet fired the M-1 rifles they had

The 24th infantry regiment moves into battle in korea, July 18, 1950. (National Archives/Department of Defense)

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been issued; only when they saw the North Koreans advancing did they discover that the rifles were defective. On July 6, the Americans fought a brief skirmish along a stream north of Pyongtaek. Col. Jay B. Lovless, who had commanded the 34th Infantry for only a month before the start of the war, ordered his men to withdraw to secure positions about 15 miles farther south rather than risk the fate of Task Force Smith. (His orders were unclear as to whether and how long he was to hold his position in the face of a determined enemy attack.) The retreat turned into a disorderly rout, with soldiers discarding their weapons, helmets, and even their shoes along the way. Marguerite Higgins (the only female war correspondent in Korea) reported seeing “young Americans turn and bolt in battle, or throw down their arms cursing their government for what they thought was embroilment in a hopeless cause . . .” An enraged General Dean sacked Lovless as commander of the 34th on July 7. Lovless’s replacement, Col. Robert Martin, had arrived in Korea only the day before. He was killed in action July 8, cut in half by tank fire while trying to destroy a North Korean tank with a bazooka. The 34th Infantry Regiment once again pulled back in panic.

an infantryman (foreground) loads a new clip into his M-1 rifle, as his companion fires at the enemy. (Lyndon Baines Johnson Library & Museum)

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Marguerite higgins, war correspondent (Library of Congress)

North Koreans were now advancing virtually unopposed down Korea’s west coast. The farther south they got, the more side roads opened up from the main road leading from Seoul, and this increased the opportunity for outflanking the Americans. Every time the Americans set up a defensive line, they found themselves brushed aside with heavy casualties. The North Koreans succeeded with a simple tactic. They would hit the Americans head-on with tanks, then outflank them with infantry, getting behind U.S. positions to cut off their retreat. The Americans also found it hard to cope with the thousands of civilian refugees who clogged the roads. Sometimes North Korean soldiers wearing civilian clothes mixed in with the refugees, infiltrating U.S. lines and attacking from the rear. Jittery U.S. soldiers began firing on oncoming civilians, with many innocent lives lost. General Dean soon developed a respect for the fighting qualities of the North Koreans; he compared stopping their advance to “trying to keep water from coming through a fishnet.” General MacArthur, dismayed by the steady retreat of his forces down the peninsula, cabled the Joint Chiefs of Staff urging that at least four more divisions of U.S. troops be sent to Korea as soon as possible. North Koreans crossed the Kum River on July 14 and 15, another disaster for the Americans. U.S. commanders had hoped to hold the

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North Koreans at the river, which flowed 10 miles east of the strategically important city of Taejon and served as a kind of defensive moat. All the bridges along the river had been blown up by U.S. engineers, but the North Koreans crossed the river in barges on July 14, overrunning the 63rd Field Artillery Battalion, capturing 10 105-mm howitzers and killing or capturing more than 100 men. On July 16, the North Koreans hit the 19th Infantry Regiment, just sent to reinforce the line, a regiment known as “The Rock of Chickamauga” for its famous stand in a bloody Civil War battle. Hit from the front and along their exposed flank, the “Chicks” were forced back in disorder. Half of the regiment’s 900 men were killed or missing at the end of the day’s battle. One rifle company suffered 122 casualties out of 171 men who went into the battle. General Dean made his personal final stand against the North Koreans in the battle for control of the crucial crossroads city of Taejon, 100 miles south of Seoul, on July 19–20. Dean had set up his command center in Taejon, the sixth-largest city in South Korea, when he arrived in the country on July 3. As the North Koreans crossed the Kum, Dean

refugee columns moving south often served as cover for north korean infiltrators. (Lyndon Baines Johnson Library & Museum)

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decided to pull out the 4,000 U.S. defenders of the city, but on July 18 General Walker asked him to hold Taejon for two more days to allow the newly arrived U.S. 1st Cavalry Division time to deploy its forces. Dean’s 24th Division had recently been issued some of the army’s new 3.5-inch rocket launchers, which he hoped would give his troops, for the first time, the ability to stop the North Koreans’ T-34 tanks. The battle for the city started July 19. North Koreans again attacked from the front while encircling the city from the south. North Korea’s YAK fighter planes bombed and strafed the city and dropped propaganda leaflets calling on the Americans to surrender. North Korean heavy artillery pounded the city. By the early morning of July 20, three columns of North Korean tanks and infantry had broken into the city.

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combat medics work to save the life of a wounded soldier. (National Archives)

A hard and bloody and confusing street battle followed in the burning city. Dean, exhausted, had no real idea of how the battle was going. Instead, he went out into the streets and fought bravely if not wisely as an infantryman. “Very few of the things I did [during the battle of Taejon] could not have been done by any competent sergeant,” he later wrote. Dean went “tank hunting” with a bazooka team, and at one point was seen firing his .45 automatic pistol at a tank. Small groups of Americans managed to break out of the city during the day, on foot or in jeeps and trucks. At dusk, having ordered the city evacuated, Dean made what seemed like a miraculous escape through heavy enemy fire, careening through the streets and around burning trucks and tanks in his jeep. Later he had to abandon his jeep and take to the hills. Cut off from U.S. lines, Dean was captured by the North Koreans after five weeks of wandering through the hills, during which time he almost starved to death. Dean was the highest-ranking U.S. prisoner of war (POW) held by the North Koreans. Awarded the Medal of Honor for his part in the defense of Taejon, Dean later wrote that “I wouldn’t have awarded

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myself a wooden star for what I did as a commander.” At the end of the battle of Taejon, more than 1,100 Americans were left killed, wounded, or missing. In three weeks of fighting, during which the 24th Division was forced to retreat 100 miles, the Americans suffered heavily. Many lives were thrown away due to overconfidence and military blunders. But the young and inexperienced soldiers did buy time for reinforcements to arrive. During the 24th’s bitter retreat, the 25th Infantry Division and the 1st Cavalry Division landed in Korea. There were still too few Americans and too many North Koreans. After the battle of Taejon the remnants of the 24th Division were relieved by the 1st Cavalry. But after only a day in reserve, the exhausted men had to be thrown back into battle to block a threatened enemy envelopment of the Eighth Army’s western flank. U.S. soldiers suffered from the heat, from illness caused by drinking dirty water from the rice paddies, from insects, from a lack of food and dry clothing, and from poor physical conditioning. Pfc. Leonard Korgie of the 34th Infantry remembered the intense heat and thirst and the lack of rest: “You can’t think when you’re as fatigued as we were. I just sensed we were going to find another hill and be attacked, then find another hill and so forth, endlessly, forever. Where was it going to end? Weren’t there any other GIs in this Army?”

a wounded marine is placed in a carrier attached to a sikorsky h-5 helicopter for transport to a field hospital. (National Archives)

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The new troops rushed to the front suffered repeated defeats. The 1st Cavalry Division (which had been reorganized as an infantry division in World War II) landed in Korea on July 18 and went into battle soon after. It was bloodied in its first battle at Yongdong on July 24–25 and disappointed U.S. commanders, who had expected great things from the celebrated unit. Another unlucky unit was the 24th Infantry Regiment of the 25th Division, which landed in Korea on July 13. This was an all-black unit. (Despite President Truman’s order to desegregate the armed forces in 1948, the army still maintained segregated units at the start of the Korean War.) Elements of the 24th had performed bravely in a battle at Yechon on July 20, the

end of SegregAtion in the u.S. militAry The united states fought world war ii with a segregated army that relegated its african-american citizen soldiers, sailors, and airmen to second-class status. Blacks served in segregated units, usually commanded by white officers. demands for equal treatment met little sympathy from senior military commanders, who argued that the armed forces was no place to try out “risky” social experiments. But the hypocrisy of asking blacks to defend freedom while denying them equal opportunity in military service sparked demands for change. in 1947 the labor leader and civil rights activist a. Philip randolph organized the committee against Jim crow in Military service and Training, calling on african americans to refuse to register for the draft as long as the u.s. armed forces remained segregated. its slogan was “don’t Join a Jim crow army!” in 1948 President harry s. Truman issued an executive order directing the armed forces to desegregate. The military, especially the army, was slow to comply, and when the korean war broke out, the united states once again fielded a segregated military force. custom and prejudice finally gave way before the demands for manpower. By early 1951 black soldiers began to be assigned as replacements to white units fighting in korea; more and more the units of fresh troops sent to the conflict consisted of whites and blacks who had trained together in the united states. Late in 1951 the all-black 24th infantry regiment, which had been one of the first army units sent

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U.S. Army’s first successful counterattack in the war. But on July 22, near Sangju, another unit of the 24th Regiment withdrew from the battlefield after a sharp fight with the NKPA that cost the Americans 27 dead and nearly 300 wounded. The controversy over whether or not the unit “panicked” at Sangju remains hotly debated among historians and veterans of the action, but there is no question that the 24th’s withdrawal caused many white soldiers in Korea to question whether black soldiers would stand and fight. However, given the generally uneven to poor performance of U.S. units in the early days of the war, it is unfair to single out the black soldiers of the 24th for criticism.

to korea, was disbanded and its soldiers sent to serve alongside white soldiers in other outfits. at the end of october 1954, 15 months after the end of the korean war, the u.s. army was at last able to report that it contained no more racially segregated units.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur inspecting troops of the 24th Infantry on his arrival at Kimpo airfield for a tour of the battlefront (National Archives)

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The worst setback after the battle of Taejon was the destruction of the 3rd Battalion of the 29th Infantry Regiment. This was a unit that had been doing garrison duty on Okinawa, and it was filled with green and poorly trained troops. Arriving in Korea July 24, they were ordered to advance on the town of Hadong two days later. Their truck convoy was ambushed by the North Koreans July 27. Of the unit’s 757 men, more than 300 were killed and 100 more captured in the attack. The 29th Infantry’s 1st Battalion was cut off by the North Koreans that same day in another action, suffering an additional 215 casualties.

the no gun ri controverSy in 1999, the associated Press reported that, in the early days of the korean war, u.s. soldiers and warplanes had massacred some 400 south korean refugees near the village of no gun ri, south of seoul. according to reports by korean civilians, buttressed by the testimony of an american veteran named edward Lee daily, a column of civilians was bombed and strafed by u.s. planes on July 26, 1950. The survivors were then herded by soldiers from the u.s. army’s 1st cavalry division into two nearby railroad tunnels, where they were fired upon by u.s. soldiers over the next four days, resulting in an additional 300 deaths. according to daily, the shooting of civilians was on direct orders of u.s. officers. The report stirred controversy. in the months that followed, the u.s. army undertook its own review of the events at no gun ri, interviewing hundreds of u.s. veterans. The army’s review team concluded that an undetermined number of south korean refugees had, indeed, been killed by u.s. personnel in the vicinity of no gun ri, but that the numbers involved had probably been exaggerated. The army denied that any orders had ever been issued targeting civilians. instead, it attributed the killings to the panic and inexperience of u.s. soldiers caught up in the retreat before the north korean onslaught. according to the official report, “given the fact that many of the u.s. soldiers lacked combatexperienced officers and non-commissioned officers, some soldiers may have fired out of fear in response to a perceived enemy threat without considering the possibility that they might be firing on korean civilians.” it also turned out that edward Lee daily had lied about his combat experience and presence at no gun ri, casting further doubt on the original report. The incident remains the subject of debate.

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One of the few U.S. units to perform well its first time in combat was the 25th Division’s 27th (“Wolfhound”) Infantry Regiment, under the command of Lt. Col. John “Iron Mike” Michaelis, who as a young officer in World War II had parachuted into Normandy with the 101st Airborne Division. Michaelis’s Wolfhounds skillfully fended off a North Korean attack near Hwanggan on July 24–25, destroying six T-34 tanks and killing many North Korean infantrymen before their orderly withdrawal in the face of overwhelming enemy forces. Having had everything their way since the start of the war, the North Koreans apparently grew overconfident. With the Eighth Army on the run, the North Korean commanders decided to divide their forces. Two of the best North Korean divisions were sent south to the Korean coast, to attempt an envelopment of Pusan. This was a major blunder, for it slowed the main North Korean advance and gave the Americans time to prepare new defenses. On July 29, General Walker issued a “stand or die” order to his troops. He declared that “There is no line behind us to which we can retreat . . . [A] retreat to Pusan would be one of the greatest butcheries in history. We must fight until the end.” In fact, U.S. units continued to pull back for the next few days to the Naktong River, a natural defensive line. The delay in the North Korean advance for the first time in the war gave U.S. soldiers time to prepare. They now had adequate supplies, air support, and clear interior lines of communication. U.S. troops could be moved swiftly and easily within the remaining corner of Korea they controlled. General Walker shifted men of the 25th Division from the northern front at Taegu, where NKPA pressure had lessened, to the threatened southwestern front. Army engineers blew up the last bridge crossing the Naktong on August 2, a month and a day after the men of Task Force Smith stepped off their planes in Korea. The Americans had suffered more than 6,000 casualties since the start of the war, including nearly 1,900 dead; 900 Americans had been taken as prisoners of war. ROK forces were even harder hit, having suffered 70,000 casualties. U.S. troops now defended what became known as the “Pusan Perimeter.” This was an area of southeastern Korea about 50 miles wide and 100 miles deep, backing on to the sea on the east and south, with the Naktong River along its western edge, and a rugged mountain chain along its northern flank. The ROK held the north, while the Eighth Army held the western flank. The North Koreans had enjoyed

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ninety-mm antiaircraft guns are fired as field artillery in support of rok forces north of Taegu. (U.S. Army Military History Institute)

the initiative since June 25, but they were no longer the fighting force they had been on that day. The NKPA had suffered almost 60,000 casualties since the start of the war and had lost two-thirds of its heavy T-34 tanks. Within a few days after the Pusan Perimeter was established, the UN defenders actually outnumbered the NKPA attackers. The tide of battle was about to turn.

4

   The late summer and early autumn of 1950 brought a dramatic reversal in the fortunes of war in Korea. The triumphant North Korean advance ground to a halt in August at the edge of the Pusan Perimeter. The Eighth Army and its South Korean allies, after weeks of retreat, turned and fought the enemy to a standstill in six weeks of bloody defensive battles. And in mid-September General MacArthur launched a bold invasion of the port of Inchon, putting the United Nations on the offensive for the first time in the war. Within two weeks of the landings at Inchon, Seoul had been liberated and the North Korean army had been swept out of South Korea. Had the fighting ended on September 30, 1950, the Korean War would be remembered today as one of the greatest triumphs of U.S. arms. At the start of August, the prospects for such a smashing UN victory could not have looked more remote. By August 2 all of South Korea, except for the 5,000-square-mile rectangle of land known as the Pusan Perimeter, had fallen to the Communists. If the NKPA could cross the Naktong River in force, or sweep down from the northern mountains, they could drive the Americans and their allies into the sea. As Eighth Army commander Walton Walker reminded his men, there was no further room for retreat. Walker threw every available man into the fighting. The battered veterans of July’s battles were reinforced as quickly as ships and planes could carry U.S. and allied forces across the Pacific. More than 200 ships unloaded their cargoes of men and supplies in Pusan in the last two weeks of July. The U.S. Army’s 2nd Infantry Division, the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade, and the British 27th Brigade all arrived in August. When the soldiers climbed off the boats in Pusan, they were often sent directly to the front lines. Green and untried troops quickly absorbed the lessons of their first battles, or else they died. The horrors 

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Fresh and eager u.s. Marines, newly arrived at the vital southern supply port of Pusan, are shown prior to moving up to the front lines, august 1950. (National Archives/Department of Defense)

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of war grew familiar. Marine private Doug Koch spent a hot day in August carrying the bodies of dead buddies back to his unit’s command post: I’d never handled a body before nor had the other two Marines with me . . . I learned that day about the smell of death. A dead person smells different than a dead animal and the smell is something you never forget. It’s something that can’t be put on television or in the newsreels. They can capture the sound and some of the confusion of battle, but the smell of death is something they can’t record. The North Koreans remained on the offensive but knew that they were racing against time. Every passing day brought more U.S. soldiers, tanks, guns, and aircraft into the fight. The Communists had to win quickly if they were going to win at all. And to do so they were willing to pay virtually any price in the lives of their own soldiers. They probed constantly for weak spots in the defense of the Pusan Perimeter, and when they found one they hit it with “human wave assaults.” In these attacks, wave after wave of North Korean attackers would continue charging and dying until the U.S. defenders ran out of ammunition and were overwhelmed. Walker did not have enough troops to maintain a continuous defensive line around the Pusan Perimeter. But he was able to keep some troops in reserve behind the front lines, shifting them around as needed, anticipating or responding to enemy attacks. One of the most serious North Korean challenges came at a place called the Naktong Bulge, a stretch of the river where it looped westward. Infantry from the crack North Korean 4th Division, which had brushed past Task Force Smith early in the war, waded across the shoulder-deep water of the Naktong early on the morning of August 6. They moved trucks and tanks and heavy artillery across the river on rafts and by means of an underwater bridge they constructed. From their beachhead on the east side of the river thousands of North Koreans climbed up onto the series of high ridges that led eastward toward Pusan. First Lt. Charles Payne of the 34th Infantry had encountered the NKPA’s 4th Division before, in the fighting up near Osan in early July. Now he was once again fighting for his life, firing at the North Koreans from inside the flimsy shelter of a tin-sided gristmill:

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Badly wounded, Payne survived the attack and was awarded a Silver Star for his heroism. The North Korean attack stalled in the face of such fierce resistance, but as long as they held onto their beachhead and the hills beyond, they represented a dagger pointed at the port of Pusan, only about 30 miles to the east. U.S. army units launched several unsuccessful counterattacks. On August 17, the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade was given the assignment of spearheading the attack in the Naktong Bulge. The marines had to drive the North Koreans out of the series of high ridges overlooking the Naktong River. The toughest battle was fought for control of a mile-and-a-half-long ridge called Obong-ni, which the Marines referred to as “No Name Ridge” or, more graphically, “Bloody Ridge.”

mobilizAtion of u.S. reServeS in KoreA col. harry g. summers, a korean war veteran and military historian, argues that “without mobilization of its reserve military forces, the united states would have lost the korean war.” The u.s. army and Marine corps units available to be rushed to korea in the summer of 1950 were often woefully under strength; although draft calls were dramatically increased that summer, it would take many months to call up and train draftees. instead, the u.s. military relied heavily on its reserve forces, the overwhelming majority of whom were veterans of the world war ii. These were men who could be sent into battle without extensive preparation. Many of those who served were rushed to korea as reinforcements and replacements for regular military units already committed to battle. nearly one in five of the marines who landed at inchon in september 1950, for example, were men called up from the reserves.

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a u.s. navy corsair flying a mission over korea. corsairs were often used to support united nations ground actions. (Getty Images)

After marine Corsair fighters plastered the North Korean defenders, the marines headed up the side of the hill. Marine commander Gen. Edward Craig watched through binoculars as his troops fought their way forward, while the North Koreans poured machine-gun fire and grenades down on them. “I never saw men with so much guts,” he said at one point in that long day. The North Koreans sent in four T-34 tanks against the marines on Obong-ni, but U.S. bazookas, Pershing tanks, and fighter planes knocked them all out. By the end of the day the marines had gained the high ground, and they withstood heavy North Korean counterattacks that left hundreds of Korean bodies piled up in front of their positions. The next day the marines moved down the ridge and cleared off the remaining enemy force. Sixty-six marines were killed and nearly 300 were wounded in the attack on Obong-ni. The North Koreans’ 4th Division was virtually destroyed in the battle. In the northwest sector of the Pusan Perimeter, the Communists launched repeated assaults against the city of Taegu, an important

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cleaning out enemy entrenchments, such as the hillside bunker shown here, made battles long and bloody. (Lyndon Baines Johnson Library & Museum)

rail center and site of Eighth Army headquarters. Fortunately for the defenders of the Pusan Perimeter, the Communists made the mistake of dividing their own forces in an attempt to keep up pressure on several fronts at once. General Walker was able to move his reserve units, or “fire brigades” as they were called, into areas where the Communists threatened to break through. Soldiers from the 1st Cavalry Division turned back North Korean assaults across the Naktong on August 9, August 12, and August 14. The ROKs lost control of the town of Pohang-dong on August 10, but Americans rushed to the area and retook the town 10 days later. Some of the hardest fighting in this sector took place along the Taegu-Sanjy road. A mile-long stretch of the road ran through a river valley flanked by steep hills and was known to U.S. soldiers as the “Bowling Alley.” Beginning August 18, and for the next six nights, North Korean infantry and T-34 tanks tried to push their way down the Bowling Alley toward Taegu. The “Wolfhounds” of Col. “Iron Mike” Michaelis’s 27th Infantry Regiment held the high ground above the road. They fought the North Koreans to a standstill night after night, with artillery and Pershing tanks taking a heavy toll on the attackers.

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In a last desperate push on August 31, the North Koreans launched coordinated attacks on the U.S. 25th Division, 2nd Division, and 1st Cavalry. Once again NKPA soldiers poured across the Naktong River into the Bulge, retaking the ridges that the marines had spent so many lives clearing out two weeks earlier. Pohang-dong fell again, Taegu was threatened, and the safety of the entire Pusan Perimeter seemed in doubt. But North Korean resources in men, ammunition, and supplies were stretched to the limit. They could not exploit their temporary gains on the ground. The marines once again fought their way up Bloody Ridge in the Naktong Bulge, while the army rolled back the assault on other fronts. The NKPA’s last offensive of the war petered out by the second week in September.

u.s. M-26 Pershing tanks such as this one near inchon saw considerable action in the korean war. (Getty Images)

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cAnAdA’S role in the KoreAn wAr canada supplied more than 20,000 soldiers to the un command in the korean war, as well as naval and air force units. all of the canadians who were sent to fight in korea were volunteers. The first canadians to see action were sailors on the destroyer Cayuga, which bombarded north korean soldiers driving southward toward Pusan in august 1950. a number of other canadian destroyers took part in the blockade of the korean coastline; in september 1952, the destroyer Nootka captured a north korean mine-laying vessel—the only time in the war when a north korean ship would be taken at sea. in december 1950, the 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s canadian Light infantry, was the first unit of canadian ground forces to arrive in korea. The canadian soldiers moved to the front in February 1951 and saw heavy fighting in april when they helped beat back the chinese spring offensive. Later arrivals were organized into the canadian 25th infantry Brigade, which served as part of the highly regarded 1st British commonwealth division. The royal canadian air Force (rcaF) supplied a transport squadron to the un command, which flew supply runs. in addition, 22 rcaF fighter pilots were assigned to u.s. squadrons; altogether the canadian pilots were credited with 20 kills of enemy aircraft. although their soldiers fought side by side, the canadian and u.s. governments did not always see eye to eye on the strategy and conduct of the war. canada opposed any plans to extend the war beyond the boundaries of the korean Peninsula, such as general Macarthur’s proposals to bomb communist bases in china. slightly more than 300 canadian servicemen were killed in action, and 32 were held as prisoners of war and returned after the signing of the armistice.

In the meantime, preparations for a U.S. attack known as Operation Chromite were reaching their final stages. The target of the operation was the port city of Inchon. Inchon was located on the Yellow Sea at the mouth of the Han River, 180 miles northwest of the Pusan Perimeter and some 25 miles west of Seoul. By means of an amphibious landing at Inchon, far behind enemy lines, General MacArthur was convinced he would strike a decisive blow against the North Koreans and win the war.

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MacArthur had been committed to the idea of the Inchon landing ever since his first inspection tour to Korea back in the dark days of June. By early July, MacArthur’s staff in Tokyo was hard at work drawing up detailed plans for the landing. MacArthur hoped to launch the invasion by the third week of July, using troops from the 1st Cavalry Division. But rapid Communist gains made the plan impractical, as the First was thrown into the defense of the shrinking UN-controlled territory in southernmost Korea. By late July, MacArthur’s staff had come up with a new plan for Inchon. This time they would use the marines, the specialists in amphibious landings. The invasion of Inchon, now scheduled for September, would be coordinated with a breakout assault by UN forces from the Pusan Perimeter. In many ways, Inchon was the worst possible place for MacArthur’s amphibious landing. Deep tides and a shallow sea left the harbor at Inchon nothing more than a series of mud flats for much of the day. Moreover, the harbor was guarded by a fortified island that had to be stormed before the main assault could begin. Landing ships could proceed only through a narrow channel in the harbor on a few days of especially high tides. Even on those days, there would be only a few hours in the morning when the tides were right for an assault on the outer island, and then a few hours in the evening when the landing craft could move on to the city’s beaches and unload the main assault force. When the marines finally landed in the city in the late afternoon, they would have only about two hours of daylight to secure their positions. If the NKPA proved to be well entrenched in back of the high sea wall that ran along the beach, they would be able to inflict casualties on invaders similar to or worse than those suffered in such bloody World War II assaults as Tarawa and Iwo Jima. What MacArthur counted on was that the North Koreans, knowing all the disadvantages facing an attacker at Inchon, would let their guard down. But it was a gamble, with potentially disastrous consequences. The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), meeting with MacArthur in Tokyo in early July, were not enthusiastic. A long debate over the wisdom of the attack plan followed. If anyone other than MacArthur had proposed the plan, it would have been dismissed out of hand. But MacArthur’s great prestige, as one of the leading commanders of the victorious fighting in the Pacific during World War II, allowed him to win over

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general macarthur, assisted by gen. edward m. almond (right), observes  the shelling of inchon from fleet command ship uss Mount McKinley,  september 14, 1950. (National Archives)

the critics of the plan. The only alternative, he argued, was a continued bloody battle to defend the Pusan Perimeter. In August, MacArthur was given a reluctant go-ahead by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to prepare for some kind of amphibious landing, though not necessarily at Inchon. MacArthur deliberately kept the JCS in the dark about the final preparations, timing, and place of the invasion, until it was too late to call it off. This was an insult and abuse of authority that the JCS would not forget. With Walker and the Eighth Army committed to the defense of Pusan, MacArthur decided to form a new unit, the X (Tenth) Corps, to carry out the invasion of Inchon. X Corps was placed under the command of Gen. Edward M. Almond, who had fought bravely in both world wars and had served as MacArthur’s chief of staff in the Far East Command. X Corps would function independently of the Eighth Army, with both armies reporting directly to MacArthur in Tokyo. This divided command worked well in the late summer of 1950, but it would cause great problems for the United Nations later in the year. The strike force for the invasion of Inchon was spearheaded by the U.S. 1st Marine Division, which included the men of the 1st Provisional

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Marine Brigade, already bloodied in the defense of the Pusan Perimeter. They would be backed up by the U.S. Army’s 3rd and 7th Infantry Divisions, and by South Korean soldiers and marines. This was a huge

Seoul

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operation, and preparations for it were hard to conceal. An invasion fleet of 260 ships carrying 70,000 men set sail from Japan, Korea, and other ports, heading up the western coast of Korea. War correspondents in Japan joked about the launching of “Operation Common Knowledge,” while UN planes bombed many potential landing sites along the coast to confuse enemy planners. The fleet gathered off Inchon on September 14. MacArthur was on board the fleet’s command ship, the Mount McKinley, to watch the outcome of his great gamble. A heavy naval and air bombardment of the fortified island of Wolmi-do, which lay 500 yards off the main port of Inchon, began at 5:45 a.m. on September 15. The marines hit the beach on Wolmi-do at 6:33 a.m. Some of those taking part in the landings were veterans of the Pacific fighting of World War II, and visions of the bloody reception they had met from the Japanese were going through their minds. But once they landed, they met almost no resistance from the few stunned survivors of the bombardment. The island was reported secured little more than an hour later, with no U.S. deaths. It was a good beginning, and it was followed in the evening by even greater success. The main landing at Inchon began when high tide came in late that afternoon. The marines hit two beaches, Red Beach in the main port and Blue Beach to the south of the city. They used wooden and aluminum ladders to climb out of landing craft and scale the high concrete seawalls that bordered the city. Marine private Fred Davidson had landed on Wolmi-do early in the morning and spent the day waiting for the main attack to begin. When it came, he had a spectacular view from the top of the 350-foot-high hill on Wolmi-do: I could see both landing sites. This was fantastic! It was just like watching a John Wayne movie projected on an enormous 3-D Cinemascope screen. Not everyone can say they actually witnessed a Marine Division making a landing on a beach. It was simply beautiful! The operation was not without some hitches. The navy did not always get the marines on the right beaches at the right time. Marine major Edwin Simmons was searching for his assigned landing zone through the smoke drifting off Blue Beach. He asked the driver of

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over the top: Marines hit the beach at inchon, september 15, 1950. (National Archives)

his LVT (landing vehicle tank) if he had a compass. “He looked at his instrument panel and said, ‘Search me. Six weeks ago I was driving a truck in San Francisco.’ ” Once ashore, Americans were in more danger from the navy’s “friendly fire” than they were from the light resistance put up by the North Koreans. Despite such mishaps, the marines had secured the city by midnight at a cost of only 20 men killed. One of the few who died that day was a marine lieutenant named Baldomero “Punchy” Lopez. Lopez had been one of the first marines over the seawall at Red Beach. Attacking a North Korean bunker, he was shot in the hand and had to drop the grenade he was holding. In order to protect the other men in his platoon he threw himself on top of the loose grenade and was killed in the explosion. He was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroism. Eighteen thousand Americans were ashore at Inchon before the night ended. Fifty thousand were ashore within the next four days. By the end of the first full day of the invasion, the marines had advanced 10 miles eastward on the road to Seoul. MacArthur himself was ashore

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The inchon landing, september 15, 1950 (National Archives)

on September 17, driving to the front to see the remains of a convoy of North Korean tanks the marines had just destroyed. The North Koreans, while taken by surprise, were not yet defeated. They put up a stiff fight in the streets of Seoul in the last week of September. General Almond declared the city of Seoul officially “liberated” on September 25, three months to the day after the start of the North Korean invasion. In fact, it took another three days of heavy fighting in the center of the city to clear out enemy resistance. The North Koreans had built roadblocks in the streets that had to be cleared with bulldozers before U.S. tanks could move ahead, while hidden snipers picked off U.S. infantrymen. The Americans advanced slowly through the city, fighting building by building and street by street. Much of the city was leveled, and many civilians were killed in the battle. On September 29, with artillery fire still shaking the city, General MacArthur turned over the liberated South Korean capital in the name of the United Nations and “a merciful Providence” to a tearful Syngman Rhee. While x Corps was breaking out of Inchon, the Eighth Army was breaking out of the Pusan Perimeter. On September 16, Walker’s men

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launched coordinated assaults all along the perimeter. After three days of hard fighting, the NKPA were retreating all along the line. Walker’s Eighth Army linked up with Almond’s x Corps on September 27 near the site of the original U.S. defeat at Osan. And South Korean soldiers reached the 38th parallel two days later. With the success of the Inchon invasion and the breakout from Pusan, the United States and the United Nations had achieved all of the goals outlined in the Security Council resolutions of the early summer. The cost of victory had been high. Total U.S. casualties at the end of September 1950 included 6,000 dead, 19,000 wounded, and 2,500 captured or missing. But South Korea was freed from its invaders, who were driven back in disorder into North Korea. Collective security had triumphed over aggression. The rapid and overwhelming nature of victory in September 1950 bred a fatal arrogance among the victors that led to a redefinition of war aims. In Tokyo and Washington, U.S. leaders now saw what they believed was a golden opportunity to “roll back” communism by

Marines fight house-to-house to rid seoul of its north korean occupiers in late september 1950. seoul would change hands four times in the course of the war. (U.S. Army Military History Institute)

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on september 29, 1950, seoul was liberated, and the flag was raised over the u.s. consulate. (National Archives)

continuing the UN drive into North Korea. This decision prolonged the war for an additional two years during which tens of thousands more Americans and millions of Koreans would lose their lives. The tremendous UN military victory in the late summer of 1950 prepared the way for military disaster in the fall and winter to come.

5

         Between June and September 1950, communism had been dealt a major defeat in Korea. Thanks to the swift intervention of the United Nations, South Korean independence had been maintained and the principle of collective security against external aggression strengthened. But the war did not come to an end when UN forces drove the North Koreans back across the border. Even before the Inchon invasion turned the tide of battle in South Korea, U.S. policy makers were debating whether or not UN armies should cross the 38th parallel into North Korea. On September 27, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent MacArthur a directive authorizing him to carry the war to the north. The U.S. government deliberately kept hazy the purpose for the invasion of the north. While the Americans wanted to see all of Korea united under the anticommunist government of Syngman Rhee, some of their UN allies were reluctant to discard the original, purely defensive justification for intervention. As far as the world was told, Americans and other UN forces were crossing the border simply to complete the destruction of the North Korean army’s offensive capacity. Despite the smashing victory U.S. troops had already gained, President Truman was fearful of the domestic political consequences of appearing “soft on communism” should the UN offensive be halted short of total victory. Public opinion polls revealed that a majority of Americans would view any plan to halt the UN offensive at the 38th parallel as “appeasement” of the Communists. Only five years earlier, General MacArthur had accepted the unconditional surrender of the Japanese aboard a U.S. warship in Tokyo Bay. The lesson of the two world wars the United States had fought in the 20th century seemed clear: Total victory over an aggressor was the only sure guarantee against future aggression. This view had an extremely popular 63

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spokesman in Douglas MacArthur, whose prestige was at an all-time high after his triumph at Inchon. Now, he assured the president and the Joint Chiefs of Staff complete victory in Korea was within the grasp of the United States at little or no risk of a wider or prolonged war. How could they refuse? Whatever the United Nations decided to do, Syngman Rhee was determined to have his armies conquer North Korea, now that his lifelong ambition of ruling a united Korea seemed so close to being realized. The ROKs began their advance up the eastern coast of North Korea on October 1. They made it look easy. By October 10, ROK units had entered the port city of Wonsan, 110 miles north of the border, and were making impressive gains in the middle of the peninsula as well. The battered NKPA was incapable of mounting a sustained resistance to the invaders. By the third week of October, advanced ROK units were approaching the Yalu River. On October 9, U.S. forces crossed the 38th parallel, joining the ROK offensive against North Korea. Over the objections of many of his senior commanders in Korea, MacArthur divided his forces in a two-pronged drive northward. North Korea’s mountainous central region made a coordinated assault alongside a wide front impossible. MacArthur decided that the Eighth Army, under the command of Gen. Walton Walker, should push northward from Seoul along the highway and railroad line linking the South Korean capital to the North Korean capital of Pyongyang. Meanwhile, MacArthur dispatched x Corps, the victors of Inchon, on a long, slow boat trip all the way around the Korean Peninsula to the eastern coast of North Korea. At a moment when the enemy was falling back in disorder, his choice of strategy defied military common sense. But MacArthur had grown enamored of amphibious landings, which had produced such a resounding victory at Inchon. He wanted to repeat the tactic, landing x Corps at the North Korean port of Wonsan. From there, x Corps, under the command of Gen. Edward Almond, would be in a position to advance westward to link up with the Eighth Army at Pyongyang. Getting x Corps on board ship at Inchon and off again at Wonsan proved a logistical nightmare, wasting precious weeks. The landing at Wonsan was stripped of any real strategic value when the ROKs, marching by land, captured the city on October 10. Complicating matters even further, it took the U.S. Navy two weeks to sweep Wonsan Harbor clean of the mines sown by the North Koreans, while the

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crossing the 38th parallel (National Archives)

bored marines (who began to call the plan “Operation Yo Yo”) waited uselessly off shore. By the time x Corps finally landed on October 25, its mission had changed. Pyongyang had already fallen to the hardcharging Eighth Army. MacArthur now ordered that x Corps (reinforced by soldiers from the 7th Division, who landed unopposed at the North Korean port of Iwon on October 29, and later by the army’s 3rd Division) drive northward toward the Yalu, linking up with the Eighth Army north of the central mountainous region of the country. UN forces in eastern North Korea pushed inland without great difficulty. The marines, along with units from the army 7th Infantry Division, advanced 64 miles along the road north from the port of Hungnam to the village of Hagaru, at the bottom of the Chosin Reservoir. (The reservoir had been built by the Japanese as part of northern Korea’s hydroelectric system.) From there, U.S. soldiers advanced up the eastern shore, while the marines headed northwest of the reservoir toward the Yalu River. By late October the United Nations had two separate armies in North Korea, under separate command, acting independently and unable to maintain any ground contact with each other. The Eighth Army and x Corps were in a race to penetrate North Korea. But in

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between the two northward-driving UN armies lay a 75-mile-wide expanse of roadless and unguarded mountains. It was almost a textbook illustration of a fundamental military error—dividing forces and exposing vulnerable flanks in the face of the enemy. As long as the only foe the UN forces had to face was the crumbling NKPA, it did not make a great deal of difference. But there were disturbing signs that this was about to change. U.S. policy making in the Korean War was complicated by tensions building between the commander in chief, President Truman, and the commander of UN forces in Korea, General MacArthur. By midsummer of 1950, differences between MacArthur and Truman had already been publicly revealed. On his own initiative, MacArthur made a trip to Taiwan in late July to shore up Nationalist Chinese morale at a moment when an invasion by Chinese Communists seemed imminent. In a press conference following his meeting with Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, MacArthur implied that the United States was prepared to come to the aid of Chiang’s regime in the event of a Communist Chinese invasion attempt. Chiang went even further, declaring that the United States and Nationalist Chinese were prepared to work together for “final victory” over the Chinese Communists, a statement that could be interpreted to mean that the United States was prepared to back Chiang in a Nationalist invasion of the mainland. Truman, who had no intention of committing the U.S. military to the invasion of China, was infuriated by these comments. The president feared that such loose talk increased the likelihood of Chinese intervention in the Korean conflict. (For the same reason, he had already turned down Chiang Kai-shek’s offer to send 30,000 Nationalist Chinese troops to fight in South Korea.) There was also an important constitutional issue involved. MacArthur, as the regional military commander, seemed to be challenging the right of elected civilian authorities to determine U.S. foreign policy. Truman still hoped that these differences could be reconciled. He dispatched his National Security Advisor, Averell Harriman, to Tokyo to make it clear to MacArthur who was in charge. MacArthur told Harriman that he would “as a soldier, obey any orders that he received from the President.” Harriman was not reassured. As he reported to Truman later, “I did not feel that we came to a full agreement” about U.S. policy toward Nationalist China. MacArthur “accepted the President’s position and will act accordingly, but without full conviction.”

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The fragile truce between Truman and MacArthur did not last long. At the end of August MacArthur drafted a letter to be read to the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), in which he described Taiwan as the key to the defense of all U.S. interests in the Pacific. Given their previous disagreement, Truman regarded this as another act of insubordination by MacArthur and considered removing him from command. But with the landings at Inchon scheduled to take place in only three weeks, Truman did not want to do anything to risk the success of the operation. Instead he sent MacArthur a cable demanding that he retract his statement on Taiwan. MacArthur complied, though not before the contents of the VFW letter were leaked to the U.S. press. Truman had good reason to be concerned about the intentions of Communist China’s leader, Mao Zedong. Mao, whose victorious armies had secured communist power only a year before, had no intention of allowing a hostile power to take over a country on China’s border. Korea, after all, had been one of the bases from which the Japanese had attacked and conquered Manchuria in the 1930s. The

“two chinAS” confront eAch other The communist-controlled People’s republic of china had not yet marked its ninth month of existence when war broke out between the two koreas. while Mao Zedong was preoccupied in 1949–50 with consolidating communist control of the mainland, he had not forgotten that his longtime enemy, nationalist leader chiang kai-shek, still ruled over the chinese province of Taiwan with the aid of 2 million anticommunist chinese who had fled with him to refuge on the island. From this bastion, chiang repeatedly announced his intention of returning to the mainland someday to drive out the communists. had the north koreans prevailed in their conquest of south korea, without interference from the united states, Mao would have been encouraged on his designs on Taiwan. But, as events turned out, the korean war proved chiang’s salvation. with the u.s. 7th Fleet patrolling the straits of Taiwan, the chinese communists lost the opportunity to complete their conquest. “Two chinas” would confront each other across the straits for decades to come.

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Chinese government began sending out diplomatic signals as early as August that it would not tolerate a U.S./UN invasion of North Korea. On September 30, after Seoul had been recaptured, but before UN forces crossed the 38th parallel, Chinese foreign minister Zhou Enlai (Chou En-lai) warned in a speech in Peking that “The Chinese people enthusiastically love peace, but [will not] tolerate seeing their neighbors being savagely invaded by the imperialists.” A few days later Zhou bluntly warned the Indian ambassador to China that if the Americans crossed the 38th parallel, the Chinese would send their troops south across the Yalu. The United States chose to disregard these warnings, and that proved to be a mistake. Two weeks after Zhou’s warning to the Indian ambassador, and a week after the Eighth Army crossed the 38th parallel, Chinese Communist soldiers began their move into North Korea under cover of darkness. By October 24, nearly 200,000 Chinese soldiers, undetected by U.S. intelligence, had already crossed the river and were hiding in the rugged northern provinces of North Korea. Many more were on the way. In U.S. military lingo, these units were referred to as the Chinese Communist Forces (CCF). The Chinese government would

Mao Zedong (1893– 1976), chairman of the chinese communist Party (New York Public Library)

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President Truman and general Macarthur met for the first time in their careers on wake island, october 14, 1950. despite their smiles here, the two men had no liking for each other, and within six months Truman had relieved Macarthur of command. (Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library)

maintain that these were “volunteers,” but in fact they were regular, battle-hardened units of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. The Chinese kept the names of the units and their commanders a secret. Some historians believe that Lin Biao (Piao), a leading Chinese Communist with considerable military experience, initially commanded the Chinese forces committed to Korea. By 1951, command had shifted to Gen. Peng Dehuai (P’eng Teh-huai), a heavyset man of peasant background who was a rugged and aggressive commander. Like the men under their command, Lin and Peng had gained a wealth of battlefield experience fighting against the Japanese and the Chinese Nationalists. While the Chinese secretly moved into North Korea, Truman flew to Wake Island in the mid-Pacific for a meeting on October 15 with MacArthur. Although the meeting was apparently cordial, the two leaders came away from it despising each other. MacArthur regarded the entire affair, which had been Truman’s idea, as a publicity stunt to aid the Democrats’ chances in the upcoming congressional elections in November. For his part, Truman was repelled by MacArthur’s evident

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sense of self-importance. Truman may have had the elections in mind when he scheduled the meeting, but he also wanted MacArthur’s assurance that the invasion of North Korea would not lead to Chinese intervention. MacArthur replied that there was “very little” chance of that happening, and even if the Chinese did decide to cross the Yalu River, the U.S. air force would “slaughter” them. When UN forces first moved into North Korea, their orders expressly prohibited them from approaching the country’s border provinces with China or the Soviet Union. Only ROK forces would be allowed to pursue the enemy that far northward, to avoid possible clashes between U.S. troops and those of the communist giants to the north. But again, with easy victory in sight, MacArthur decided to stretch his authority. On October 24, without consulting the military Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) in Washington, he ordered UN commanders “to drive forward through the north with all speed and with full utilization of their forces.” The JCS was disturbed by the order, but once again did not restrain MacArthur. In the summer fighting in South Korea, U.S. troops had suffered from the brutal heat. Now the Americans fighting in North Korea were beginning to suffer from the onset of the bitter winter cold. Many of them had not been issued heavy winter clothing, and they longed for a warm, dry, comfortable barracks back in the United States or Japan. Still, with the NKPA soldiers fleeing before them, Americans were confident that the worst was past them. After all, General MacArthur had declared that the troops would be “home by Christmas.” Pvt. James Cardinal of the 5th Cavalry Regiment wrote his parents after taking part in the capture of Pyongyang: “There’s a rumor going around that the 1st Cavalry Division is returning to Japan pretty soon, now that the war is over. I certainly hope so. I’m sick of this country and this war.” Some soldiers were so confident that they even abandoned their heavy steel helmets in the belief that they would not see any more combat. But it soon became apparent that such confidence was misplaced. The war was not over by a long shot. The first clash between the advancing UN forces and the CCF came on October 26. An ROK battalion that had reached a position about 40 miles south of the Yalu was set upon by the Chinese and destroyed. Other ROK units were hammered in the week that followed. Despite the fact that some Chinese soldiers had been captured in the fighting, MacArthur at first refused to believe that the CCF was involved at all. Finally

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convinced that there were Chinese in North Korea, he suggested that the Communists had sent in only a token force of fewer than 20,000 troops.

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The first CCF attack on U.S. troops came on November 1. Chinese soldiers attacked the 8th U.S. Cavalry, which was occupying the town of Unsan. The attack came as a total surprise. The Chinese cut off the Americans’ line of retreat and inflicted heavy casualties in fierce hand-to-hand combat. Chinese soldiers, with bugles and whistles blowing, swarmed over U.S. defenses. The 5th Cavalry, which tried unsuccessfully to break through to relieve the encircled 8th, was also hard hit. Capt. Norman Allen of the 5th Cavalry wrote home to his mother shortly after the battle at Unsan, “Anyone who says they aren’t [Chinese] is crazy!” The next day marines near the Chosin Reservoir engaged the Chinese but fared better than the Eighth Army’s soldiers. The marines beat back the CCF attackers and were able to continue their advance. In another ominous development, Chinese MiG-15 fighter planes began to challenge UN control of the air south of the Yalu in early November. The first U.S. plane was downed by a MiG on November 8. U.S. pilots dubbed the area just south of the Yalu “MiG alley” and were angered that they were not allowed to follow the MiGs in hot pursuit when Chinese pilots flew back across the Yalu to sanctuary in Manchuria. But the British—members of the UN team that was nominally in charge of the war—insisted that there be no hot pursuit; they feared any action that might provoke a full-scale Chinese intervention, and

This russian-built Mig-15 fighter interceptor was flown to a u.s. air Force base in kimpo near seoul on september 21, 1953, by a north korean officer pilot in a daring flight to freedom. (National Archives)

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F-86 sabre jets, with the checkerboard tails identifying them as belonging to the 51st Fighter interceptor wing, are readied for combat at suwon air Base in south korea. (U.S. Air Force)

Washington went along. The Chinese, for their part, avoided direct attacks on UN military ground forces from the air. MacArthur, finally convinced of the reality of Chinese intervention, ordered U.S. planes to bomb the bridges across the Yalu linking Manchuria and North Korea. Truman, hearing of the order and fearing the consequences of accidental bombing of Chinese territory, at first countermanded it. But after MacArthur warned of a “calamity of major proportion” unless the bridges were bombed, Truman relented. It made no difference, because the bombers were unable to destroy all the bridges, and in mid-November the Yalu froze solid, allowing troops and supplies to cross without the use of bridges. The JCS were having increasing doubts about MacArthur’s plans for victory. They questioned whether the United States should shift its strategy, halt its military offensive, and seek a political settlement to the conflict. MacArthur, responding on November 9, still insisted that he could destroy any forces the Chinese were prepared to commit to the war. He now planned to launch an offensive in late November to bring the war to “complete victory.” Having given the UN forces a bloody nose, the CCF suddenly halted their attacks and withdrew to their hidden positions on November 7.

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MacArthur, who still underestimated the number of Chinese troops in the country, was once again lulled into overconfidence. The Eighth Army, which had pulled back to more defensible positions after the first Chinese attacks, resumed its advance in the second week of November. On November 23, Thanksgiving Day, UN troops in Korea ate a special turkey dinner, flown or trucked up to the front. It was, Pvt. Arthur Cohen of the army’s 2nd Division wrote in his diary, “the best meal we had in Korea.” Some of the soldiers at the front even enjoyed the luxury of hot showers and a change of clothes. On the next day, November 24, UN forces renewed their offensive, prepared to win the war and be home for Christmas. Already a small unit from the army’s 7th U.S. Division had reached the Yalu River at Hyesanjin. Pvt. Paul Martin of the 1st Marine Division remembered that “the sweet smell of victory was again in the air.” That was when disaster struck. Army historian Roy Appleman would later write that in the month that followed Thanksgiving 1950, “a series of disasters unequaled in our country’s history overwhelmed American arms.” The second phase of the Chinese offensive was about to begin. The Chinese, who lacked tanks, air support, and heavy artillery, relied instead on surprise to defeat the Americans. CCF commanders displayed an extraordinary ability to move large numbers of troops on night marches undetected through difficult terrain. Chinese troops were masters of the art of camouflage and could stay completely hidden during the day. The official U.S. Marine Corps history of the war noted: “The Chinese coolie in the padded cotton uniform could do one thing better than any other soldier on earth; he could infiltrate around an enemy position in the darkness with unbelievable stealth.” While newspapers in the United States carried sensational dispatches about Chinese “human wave” attacks, the reality at the front was quite different. As marine historians noted, “The Chinese seldom attacked in units larger than a regiment . . . It was not mass but deception and surprise which made the Chinese Red formidable.” Despite limited food, inadequate clothing, and few other comforts, the Chinese soldiers proved tough, disciplined fighters, not the “laundry-men” that MacArthur ridiculed. The gathering storm broke on the evening of November 25, when the Eighth Army was hit with “human wave” assaults. It proved a terrifying experience for the U.S. soldiers. Many units were overrun. Lt. Ellison Wynn of the 9th Infantry held out with his troops against

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in an engagement with the enemy during the korean war, u.s. Marines watch as ground-to-ground rockets are fired. (Getty Images)

overwhelming odds. When he ran out of ammunition, he began hurling rocks and cans of field rations at the enemy, until he was wounded by an enemy grenade. (Wynn miraculously survived the attack and was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross for heroism.) Overall, the Eighth Army’s exposed front line disintegrated into chaos. The army’s 2nd Division, 25th Division, and 1st Cavalry Division all took heavy losses in the Chinese attacks, as did three ROK divisions and the Turkish Brigade. MacArthur, finally conceding the dangers his troops faced, cabled the Pentagon on November 28: “We face an entirely new war.” The arrival of MacArthur’s cable, so different from the assurances he

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the u.S. Air force in the KoreAn wAr The korean war represented a new stage in the history of u.s. airpower. it was the first war in which the u.s. air Force (usaF) fought as a separate branch of the armed services. it was also the first war in which jet-propelled aircraft played a major role in aerial warfare. while the united states suffered major setbacks on the ground in the summer of 1950, and again between november 1950 and March 1951, it established its air superiority in the first days of the war and thereafter never lost control of the skies. The usaF’s Far east air Force, which consisted of the Fifth air Force (used for tactical operations), Bomber command, and combat cargo command, flew nearly 750,000 sorties during the war. By the end of the war, usaF pilots were credited with shooting down 950 enemy aircraft, destroying more than 1,300 tanks, and killing nearly 185,000 enemy troops. The best-known plane flown by usaF fighter pilots during the korean war was the F-86 sabrejet, which racked up an impressive eight-to-one kill ratio over the skies of north korea in combat with communist jets. There were 38 air force pilots in the korean war who won ace status (credited with shooting down five or more enemy aircraft). More than 1,400 usaF aircraft of all types were downed by enemy fire or other causes during the war; 1,180 usaF personnel were killed in action; many thousands more were listed as missing in action and presumed to have been killed. Two hundred and fourteen airmen returned from prisoner-of-war camps at the end of the war, and an undetermined number of others died in captivity.

had given Truman six weeks earlier at Wake Island, shocked officials in Washington. The Eighth Army was forced to fall back. General Walker had originally hoped to hold Pyongyang against the Chinese offensive, but soon decided to abandon all of North Korea. Pyongyang was evacuated by December 5, its huge supply dumps set on fire and hundreds of vehicles abandoned by the retreating Americans. By December 13, the Eighth Army had taken up new defensive lines south of the 38th parallel. They were back to where they had started in October.

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However disorganized and disheartening the Eighth Army’s retreat, it was nothing compared to the plight of the marines and soldiers of x Corps to the east. For a month, General Almond had been pressing his field commanders to advance as rapidly as possible, hoping to beat the Eighth Army to the Yalu. On November 27, two days after the start of a massive CCF assault on the Eighth Army, Almond ordered the marines on the west side of the Chosin Reservoir and the army’s 7th Division on the east side of the reservoir to renew their offensive. Many officers, especially the marines’ battle-hardened commander Gen. Oliver P. Smith, were reluctant to advance any farther, without knowing the extent of the CCF presence. The marines’ supply line from the port of Hungnam was already stretched out and vulnerable to attack at many points. The farther the marines advanced up the western side of the Chosin Reservoir, the greater the risk they ran of being cut off by the enemy. The Chinese struck x Corps on the night of November 27. More than 100,000 CCF troops had taken up positions in the hills overlooking the road that was the x Corps lifeline to Hungnam. On the east side of the Chosin Reservoir, the 3,200 soldiers of Task Force MacLean (named for its commander, Col. Allan D. “Mac” MacLean) found themselves cut off by the Chinese from any retreat. For the next four days they fought a desperate battle to break through Chinese roadblocks. MacLean was wounded and captured by the Chinese, dying a few days later in captivity. His successor, Lt. Col. Don C. Faith, was killed and posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. The column of trucks carrying the unit’s wounded soldiers was mistakenly hit with napalm by U.S. aircraft. In the end, only about 1,000 of the task force’s 3,200 men escaped death or capture, and only about 350 of these were in any condition to fight. The pitiful remnants of the task force staggered or dragged themselves across the frozen waters of the Chosin to the marine stronghold at Hagaru on the reservoir’s southern tip. The same fate threatened to overtake the 10,000 marines of the 1st Marine Division, about 2,000 U.S. soldiers, and a small unit of British Royal Marine Commandos on the western side of the reservoir. In an epic battle, starting on December 1, these men fought their way through the encircling Chinese army back to the coast. The battle of the Chosin Reservoir was destined to become the most famous battle of the Korean War. The fact that the marines and others made it out had much to do with the determination and

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Marines withdraw to hagaru, november 28–december 3, 1950, in five days and nights of below-zero winds and icy roads. (National Archives)

the foresight of their commander, Gen. Oliver P. Smith. Before the Chinese attack, Smith had advanced cautiously, carefully stockpiling supplies along the road from Hungnam. When he began his retreat, he resisted suggestions that his men abandon their vehicles and be evacuated by plane from Hagaru. Smith reasoned that even if some of his men could be evacuated by air, the Chinese would soon be able to overrun the positions of those who guarded the airstrip’s shrinking perimeter. In the end, the only Americans to be flown out of Hagaru were 4,000 wounded men. The rest would have to walk to the sea. Smith shared the sufferings of his men in the bitter cold. His attitude was summed up in a famous remark he made on December 4, when he responded to a question from a war correspondent about the marines’ “retreat”: “We’re not retreating. We are just advancing in a different direction.” By December 4, all the surviving Americans had made it back to Hagaru. Marine private Doug Michaud would recall later: All the way from Yudam-ni to Hagaru-ri it was, “Five more miles, guys, warm buildings, hot chow. Just five miles guys.” .  .  . Hell, I thought, the war’s over at Hagaru-ri. No one suspected that it would get worse there.

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From Hagaru, starting on December 6, the Americans fought their way off the plateau and down a long mountain road to the valley leading to Hungnam. By December 7, all the UN forces were out of Hagaru, and the rear guard blew up the bridge over the Changjun River south of the town to slow the Chinese following. But the road ahead was full of peril. It was hard and treacherous, every step of the way. Riding down the narrow, icy, twisting road, trucks and tanks skidded off onto the rocks below. The Chinese held the hills and seemed to lie in ambush around each new bend in the road. Somehow the exhausted Americans found the strength to fight on. Air strikes helped beat back the attacks, and supplies were parachuted in to the long column of trucks and marching men. But nothing could protect the men from the freezing cold. At night, temperatures dropped to 20 degrees below zero. A frozen weapon could cost a man his life, so the marines slept with their rifles pressed against their bodies. Cans of emergency rations and canteens of water had to be thawed over open fires so that the men could eat and drink. A lucky soldier or marine was able to take a turn thawing out in a “warming tent,” heated by little stoves, before being sent back to an icy foxhole or to trudge on down the road. Lives of wounded men were lost because doctors could not use blood plasma, which froze in the bottles and tubes. Frostbitten hands and feet were a constant danger. Marine private Jack Wright was ordered onto a truck when his feet froze. An older marine on the truck told Wright to take off his boot. When I pulled the socks off, a layer of skin also came off. The old guy unbuttoned his parka and dungaree jacket and took my foot and placed it on his bare belly. That’s how one Marine will take care of another . . . The Chinese also suffered in the intense cold. Marine sergeant Lee Bergee captured “several exhausted Chinese” wearing lightweight tennis shoes and whose feet had swollen to “the size of footballs” from the effects of frostbite. “Some of them,” he remembered, “had to have their fingers broken in order for us to take the rifles from their frozen hands.” To cut off the U.S. retreat, the Chinese had blown a 16-foot gap in a bridge that spanned the road at a place known as Funchilin Pass. The surrounding hillsides were so steep that there was no way for trucks or

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tanks to bypass the bridge. But U.S. engineers were able to bridge the gap with heavy steel spans dropped by parachute from the air. When the last American had crossed the bridge on December 11, the engineers blew up the bridge. That same day, the last of the weary marines reached safety within the U.S. Army’s perimeter around Hungnam. Master Sgt. Thomas Britt of the army’s 3rd Division was part of a task force sent out from Hungnam to link up with the marines: Cold chills still go up my spine as I recall watching Marines, themselves frozen from head to foot, meticulously caring for their wounded and bringing back the dead bodies of their comrades. The Marines were battle-scarred, but still looked as if they could do battle. It reminded me of pictures I’ve seen of General Washington’s frozen troops at Valley Forge. In the week before Christmas, 22,000 marines, 80,000 other troops, and 90,000 refugees were evacuated by sea from the port of Hungnam,

in december 1950, marines gather their dead for burial after an ambush during the withdrawal from chosin reservoir. (Lyndon Baines Johnson Library & Museum)

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a column of korean civilian refugees moves south before advancing chinese armies, January 1951. (U.S. Army Military History Institute)

which was then destroyed by naval gunfire. The marines lost more than 700 killed, nearly 200 missing, and 3,500 wounded in the withdrawal from the Chosin Reservoir. Thousands more were struck down by frostbite or dysentery. More than 10,000 Chinese attackers were killed. On the home front Americans had closely followed the reports of the Chosin Reservoir battle and were cheered by the marines’ heroic effort to reach Hungnam. But there was little else to cheer about in the news from Korea. By Christmas 1950, Korea had seen yet another great reversal in the fortunes of war, the third since the North Korean invasion in June. The Eighth Army and x Corps had abandoned North Korea. To top off a month of bad news, the commander of the Eighth Army, Gen. Walton Walker, was killed in an accident on December 23, when the jeep he was traveling in swerved into a ditch to avoid a collision with an ROK weapons carrier. Extreme pessimism once again became the mood in Washington. It was feared that the Chinese might continue their advance and overrun the U.S. forces in South Korea. At a press conference on November 30, Truman made headlines (and shocked his British allies, who had not been consulted) by threatening to use atomic weapons in Korea if needed. Contingency plans were drawn up for a withdrawal back to the Pusan Perimeter, and even for a total evacuation. General MacArthur argued that the United States should be prepared to fight all-out war

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sounding “Taps” over the graves of fallen Leathernecks during memorial services at the 1st Marine division cemetery at hungnam, following the division’s heroic breakout from chosin reservoir, december 13, 1950 (National Archives/Department of Defense)

to salvage its position in Korea, even at the risk of involving the Soviet Union and China in a world war. He demanded that UN forces be reinforced with Chinese Nationalist troops, that the U.S. Navy blockade the Chinese coasts, and that the U.S. Air Force bomb Manchuria. Despite his careless talk about atomic weapons, Truman wanted to limit the size of the conflict. He feared, however, that the war would spread regardless of his intentions, confiding to his diary on December 9 that it seemed “like World War III is here.” But the conflict remained a localized and limited war. For the next two years U.S. leaders searched for a way to bring the war to an end. All the while, the killing continued. From now on it would be a war to hold the line, until the diplomats could patch up some kind of mutually acceptable peace.

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    The two months that followed the launching of the Chinese offensive in November 1950 saw the longest retreat in U.S. military history. Before a secure defensive line was established (very near Osan, where Task Force Smith had first met the North Koreans the previous July), the U.S. Eighth Army had retreated 275 miles from the positions it held on the eve of the Chinese attack. North Korea was once again entirely under Communist control, and South Korea’s future looked grim. But with the arrival of a new commander, Gen. Matthew Ridgway, the Eighth Army regained its fighting spirit. And with the relief of General MacArthur as UN supreme commander, President Truman reestablished his control over foreign policy and military decision making in the Korean War. By the late spring of 1951 it was evident that the Communists would not be able to drive the UN forces out of South Korea. But no one knew how long it would be before a negotiated settlement could end the bloody stalemate on the battlefield. As 1950 drew to an end, many U.S. troops were left demoralized by the ferocity of the Chinese attacks. “Bug-out fever” infected the UN forces. Pfc. James Cardinal of the 5th Cavalry wrote to his parents on January 7, 1951: “It looks like the beginning of the end. The Chinese are kicking hell out of the U.S. Army, and I think we are getting out, at least I hope so . . . I don’t think we can hold the Chinks.” But even as Cardinal wrote his letter, the battlefield advantage in Korea began to shift to the UN. Like MacArthur after Inchon, Chinese leaders deluded themselves into believing that a total, smashing victory would soon be theirs. Rather than halting their advance at the 38th parallel, they pressed on with their offensive. The United Nations made several proposals for a 83

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gen. Matthew ridgway, here at a press conference, first succeeded gen. walton walker as commander of the u.s. eighth army and then succeeded Macarthur as commander of all the un forces in the korean war. (Corbis)

cease-fire to the Chinese. In January 1951, the United Nations proposed that an international conference be held after the establishment of a cease-fire in Korea; the conference could discuss such issues as Chinese membership in the United Nations and the future of Taiwan. (Chiang Kai-shek’s government still held the Chinese seat in the UN Security Council.) But Chinese Communist leaders were not interested. In the face of Communist recalcitrance, the United States was able to win a vote of the UN General Assembly on February 1, branding the Chinese aggressors for their intervention in Korea. Like the Americans in the fall of 1950, the Chinese leaders would pay heavily for their delusions in the spring of 1951. Chinese advantages slipped away in January. They had suffered heavy losses in their offensive in December. And the farther south they advanced, the more difficult it was for them to keep their remaining troops supplied. UN forces, for their part, were now closer to their own supply depots and ports and fighting on more favorable terrain. Instead of having two armies separated by a vast expanse of roadless terrain, as they did in North Korea, the UN forces were united in a single force. (After the withdrawal from North Korea, x Corps was no

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longer treated as a separate army but came under the direction of the Eighth Army commander.) For the first time in the war, the United Nations could maintain a more or less continuous defensive line across

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the Korean Peninsula, shifting forces as needed by rail or road along the battlefront. And the Eighth Army gained a competent and charismatic leader who was determined to restore the morale and fighting capabilities of the hard-pressed U.S. soldiers. Lt. Gen. Matthew Ridgway had a long and distinguished military career behind him when he arrived in Korea on December 26. The 56-year-old Ridgway had been serving in Washington, D.C., as the army’s deputy chief of staff for administration. But he was not a deskbound soldier. A graduate of West Point in 1917, he had been given command of the 82nd Airborne Division in World War II and had parachuted with his men behind enemy lines in the invasion of Sicily in 1943 and the invasion of Normandy in 1944. Ridgway had the respect of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington and of General MacArthur. Truman and the Joint Chiefs expected that, unlike his predecessor, General Walker, Ridgway would be able to play a more independent role in shaping Korean strategy. When Ridgway met with MacArthur in Tokyo on December 26, MacArthur told him, “The Eighth Army is yours, Matt. Do what you think best.” Ridgway had only just arrived in Korea when the Chinese launched their Third Phase Offensive on New Year’s Eve. The Eighth Army, which had taken up positions near the 38th parallel, was given another battering. The Chinese exploited the weakness of the South Korean units, who broke and ran from the Communists as they had the previous June. Ridgway drove north of Seoul on New Year’s Day and found “ROK soldiers by the truckloads” retreating, “without order, without arms, without leaders .  .  . They had thrown their rifles and pistols away.” By January 3, Ridgway had no choice but to order the evacuation of Seoul, the second time in the war it would be lost to the Communists. Inchon, the site of MacArthur’s triumphant amphibious landing the previous September, was abandoned on January 5. The Eighth Army fell back to the Kum River, 35 miles south of Seoul. Although no one knew it at the time, this would be the farthest south the UN forces would retreat for the remainder of the Korean War. The Chinese offensive petered out after the first week in January, as their supply lines were stretched too thin. And with every passing week, they faced a more formidable foe. Unlike the retreat from North Korea in December, the Americans were not “bugging out” this time. They retreated in good order and then turned and fought

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u.s. troops here make their way through the snow during the disastrous winter campaign of 1950–51. (Getty Images)

when they reached strong defensive positions. Much of the credit for the change was owed to General Ridgway. He instilled in his men a new aggressiveness. Capturing territory, he told them, was not going to win or lose the war; instead, their goal should be to kill as many of the enemy as possible. Ridgway was soon a familiar figure along the front lines in Korea, famed for grenades he wore strapped on his combat jacket. The trouble with the Eighth Army, he told his officers, was that it had been road-bound; the Chinese had controlled the hills and were pounding U.S. truck convoys at will. U.S. soldiers had to get out of trucks and jeeps and up into the hills on foot, if they wanted to win the war. Army officers who would not lead by example, and take some risks, were sent packing back to the United States. Ridgway himself probably took more risks than was wise for a commanding general. He flew reconnaissance missions in a light observation plane over enemy territory, scouting out the possibilities for offensive action.

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general Macarthur is seen here riding in a jeep during one of his occasional inspection tours of the troops in korea prior to his dismissal from command in april 1951. (Getty Images)

Under Ridgway’s command, the Eighth Army took other steps to improve the morale of its soldiers. A rest and recuperation (R&R) program was set up, so that soldiers who had spent months on the front line could spend five days’ leave enjoying the comforts available in Tokyo. The Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals (MASH), designed to provide high-quality emergency medical care to wounded soldiers, were upgraded. Wounded soldiers, evacuated from the front by helicopter, knew that their chances of survival were good if they could reach a MASH unit. (The MASH units would later become famous, thanks to the 1970 movie and 1970s television show M*A*S*H.) And in a war where sudden surprise attacks were always a danger, and where becoming a prisoner of war could be a fate worse than death, Ridgway promised that units cut off by the enemy would not be abandoned without every possible effort being made to come to their rescue. Ridgway gave orders for the Eighth Army to resume its offensive on January 25. Against light Chinese resistance, the Eighth Army recap-

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tured much of the territory it had lost earlier in the month, including the port of Inchon. In mid-February the Chinese struck back. The U.S. Army’s 23rd Regiment and a French battalion fought a bloody battle against the Chinese from February 13 to 15 for control of an area near Chipyong-ni. This was known as the Battle of the Twin Tunnels, for the two railroad tunnels penetrating a nearby mountain. Eighteen thousand Chinese troops besieged the UN defenders. The 23rd Regiment’s commander, Col. Paul Freeman, would later call it “the most desperate fight that I participated in during my entire time in Korea.” His men fought hand to hand with the Chinese for control of the hilltops. As usual, the Chinese saved their most ferocious attacks for nighttime. With flares lighting up the darkness, machine-gunner Pete Schultz recalled, “We could see [the Chinese] tumbling down like bowling pins.” At one point in the desperate battle, the French soldiers tied red scarves around their heads and charged the Chinese with fixed bayonets. The 5th Cavalry broke through to relieve the tired UN fighters on the evening of February 15. The battle was estimated to have cost the Chinese 5,000 casualties. The Eighth Army was proving its mettle.

Personnel of the 8225th Mobile army surgical hospital in korea (National Archives)

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Helicopters in tHe Korean War Thanks to the popularity of the cBs television series M*A*S*H, which  ran from 1972 to 1983, the medical evacuation helicopter came to be  one of the most widely recognized visual symbols of the korean War in  american popular memory. many lives were saved by the innovative use  of  this  new  form  of  aircraft  in  swiftly  transporting  the  wounded  from  the battlefront to mobile army surgical hospitals. But helicopters found  other pathbreaking uses in the war—as reconnaissance aircraft, in airsea rescue operations, and for troop and supply transport. The marines  made  the  most  extensive  use  of  helicopters  in  nonmedical  operations.  marine helicopter Transport squadron 161, for example, equipped with  10-seat  sikorsky  cargo  helicopters,  airlifted  nearly  1,000  marines  to  the  battlefront  in  one  operation  in  november  1951,  anticipating  the  much  more  extensive  use  of  helicopters  by  both  the  marines  and  the  u.s. army in “airmobile” operations during the Vietnam War.

U.S. Marines of the 1st Marine Division Reconnaissance Company make a helicopter landing to relieve the Republic of Korea 8th Division on September 20, 1951. (National Archives)

In Tokyo, General MacArthur grew jealous of Ridgway’s successes, especially since they undermined his call for an all-out attack against the Chinese mainland. With his usual gift for showmanship, MacArthur showed up in Korea on February 20, announcing to newspaper reporters, “I have just ordered a resumption of the offensive.” In fact,

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Ridgway had drawn up plans for a new offensive called Operation Killer, scheduled to begin February 21, without any aid from MacArthur. MacArthur’s shameless grab for publicity endangered the lives of U.S. soldiers by notifying the Chinese of the impending attack. Operation Killer and both Operation Ripper and Operation Rugged, which followed in March, were nonetheless great successes. The UN forces pushed the Chinese back across the Han River. On March 15, the Chinese abandoned Seoul (the fourth and last time the devastated city would change hands during the war). By early April, UN forces once again held territory north of the 38th parallel. Despite these reverses, the Chinese were by no means defeated. They had kept their main units a jump ahead of the UN offensive. UN forces were slowed down in their advance by the rain and mud, which came in the spring. And the Chinese had nearly inexhaustible supplies of manpower to draw upon. The Chinese armies regrouped north of the 38th parallel. Reinforcements flowed south across the Yalu. By the spring of 1951 the Communist armies, including both the Chinese and North Koreans, included roughly 700,000 men, arrayed against UN ground forces of only 420,000. The Chinese massed in the “Iron Triangle,” a 50-square-mile plateau surrounded by high mountains north of the 38th parallel. On April 22, they launched their spring offensive with 300,000 troops, the largest attack of the war. The Eighth Army pulled back, as far as 35 miles in some sectors, but UN artillery and air strikes pounded the Chinese attackers, inflicting heavy casualties. Some 4,000 men of the British 29th Brigade fought for three days against overwhelming Chinese attacks along the Imjin River north of Seoul. They managed to inflict 11,000 casualties on the attackers, while losing a quarter of their own men as casualties. The fight became known as the Battle of Gloucester Hill, for the heroic but doomed stand of the 850 men of the Gloucestershire Regiment, who were cut off from the rest of the brigade. Only 169 of the Gloucesters made it back to British lines after the battle ended; the rest were killed or captured. By the end of April the Chinese offensive ground to a halt. They struck again at the UN forces on May 16, but the myth of Chinese invincibility had ended in Korea. The UN forces had proven time and again that they could take the hardest blows the Chinese could deliver, and then strike back with devastating effect. According to the official U.S. Marine Corps history of the war, after the Chinese offensive in

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May the Communist soldiers were “scourged with bullets, rockets, and napalm as planes swooped down upon them like hawks scattering chickens.” The Chinese suffered more than 100,000 casualties in May. For the first time in the war, whole units of the Chinese army began to throw down their arms and surrender. The United Nations pursued the Chinese into the Iron Triangle, seizing control of the strategically important region in June. But this time the UN forces made no attempt to march to the Yalu. Ridgway had learned from MacArthur’s mistakes. The war of movement in Korea was coming to an end. The Korean War, like World War I, was becoming a war of fixed positions, barbed wire, minefields, and deep entrenchments on both sides. On the home front, Americans were increasingly unsettled and disturbed by the direction the war had taken. Americans were not used to fighting “police actions” for limited objectives, particularly when the fighting took place in distant and little-known areas of the globe. Most Americans were united in opposition to the spread of communism. They wanted to see communist aggression brought to a halt in Korea.

M*A*S*H, originally a novel (1968) and then a movie (1970, seen here), was one of the most popular TV series ever (1972–83) and was set during the korean war, although it aired during the Vietnam war. (Photofest)

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There was very little antiwar protest during the Korean War, except by small pacifist groups. But the war did not inspire anything like the sense of high idealism and enthusiasm so evident on the home front in the early days of World War II. In the midst of the Chinese offensive in December 1950, President Truman made a televised speech to the nation. Warning that “Our homes, our nation, all the things we believe in are in great danger,” he declared a state of national emergency. To meet the threat in Korea, the government was going to have to raise taxes, while imposing controls on wages and prices. The U.S. military would double in size to 3.5 million. More U.S. boys would be drafted, and more military reserve units would be activated and sent to Korea. (By the fall of 1950, 50,000 were drafted every month; in June 1951, Truman signed a bill extending the draft for another four years and lowering the draft age to 18.) So Korea meant higher taxes, government interference in the economy, and lengthening casualty lists of young U.S. soldiers sent to fight the war. And as the war dragged on, with no end in sight, many began to question whether it was worth the price or whether it was being fought the right way. In the first summer of fighting, public opinion polls showed that 75 percent of Americans supported Truman’s decision to send U.S. troops to Korea. The U.S. public was thrilled by the landing at Inchon, the breakout from Pusan, and the march to the Yalu. But when the good news turned to bad news in November 1950, support for the war rapidly dwindled. After the Chinese intervened, polls showed that 56 percent of Americans believed that the U.S. had made a mistake getting involved in the war, a percentage that remained more or less constant over the next two years. As the war declined in popularity, so did Truman’s presidency. Truman was being hit from two angles by his Republican opponents: He was blamed for getting the United States involved in the war in the first place and also blamed for not doing enough to win the war, once the United States was involved. Sophisticated theories about “containment” and “limited war” found little favor with the American public, who wanted to “win or get out.” Within the Republican Party there were leaders who shared the Truman administration’s belief in the importance of global collective security policies against Communist expansion, in Europe as well as in Asia. But there was also a strong right-wing element in the Republican leadership that harbored sentiments very similar to those of pre–World War II

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isolationists. While militantly anticommunist, these right-wingers were suspicious of any U.S. involvement in Europe. They disapproved of Truman’s initiative to create the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which committed U.S. troops to the defense of Western Europe against the Soviets. Instead, they saw Asia as the key region in the world where the United States should extend and defend its interests. Right-wing Republicans were also suspicious of the strengthening of the executive branch of the government in foreign policy decision making, which had taken place during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt and had continued under his successor, Harry Truman. Truman’s decision to involve the United States in Korea without a declaration of war was regarded by these Republicans as usurping the power reserved for Congress by the Constitution. For all these reasons, and also because an unpopular war was damaging the Democrats’ prospects for retaining control of the White House in the 1952 election, Republicans hammered away at the Truman administration’s policies in Korea. One of Truman’s harshest critics was the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy. First elected to the Senate in 1946, McCarthy remained an obscure figure until February 1950 when he made a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, accusing the U.S. State Department of employing hundreds of “card-carrying” members of the Communist Party. It was the influence of these hidden Communists, McCarthy argued, that had led to the “loss of China” the previous year to Mao Zedong’s forces. The charges were unfounded; despite repeated Senate investigations, McCarthy never turned up a single Communist in the State Department or in any significant position in the federal government. And China had gone communist due to the incompetence and corruption of the U.S.-backed government of Chiang Kai-shek, not because of any conspiracy in Washington. Nevertheless, McCarthy was able to dominate the newspaper headlines with such attacks, and millions of Americans were persuaded that Communists had indeed infiltrated the Democratic administration and were still influencing policy. The Korean War, which broke out four months after McCarthy’s Wheeling speech, lent him further ammunition. Speaking on the Senate floor on June 14, 1951, McCarthy hurled charges of treason against the Truman administration. Just six years after the great victory of World War II, the United States was floundering in the face of the Soviet and Communist threat:

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How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this Government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man . . . The American who has never known defeat in war does not expect to be again sold down the river in Asia. He does not want that kind of betrayal. He has had betrayal enough. He has never failed to fight for his liberties . . . He is fighting tonight, fighting gloriously in a war on a distant American frontier made inglorious by the men he can no longer trust at the head of our affairs. McCarthyism poisoned the political atmosphere in the United States; it made rational debate nearly impossible. Many Americans who were appalled by McCarthy’s charges were reluctant to speak out against him, fearing that they too would be accused of sympathizing with the communists. In the midterm congressional elections in November 1950, the Democrats lost heavily in both House and Senate races. McCarthy, who campaigned in several states on behalf of the Republicans, was

senator Joseph Mccarthy of wisconsin (National Archives)

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personally credited with defeating several incumbent Democratic senators. The political woes of the Democrats were just beginning. When Truman moved to rein in General MacArthur in the spring of 1951, his administration became one of the most unpopular in U.S. history. In the first six months of the war, MacArthur had repeatedly challenged the authority of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and of President Truman to set military and political policy in the Far East. As long as MacArthur seemed to be winning the war, leaders in Washington swallowed their resentments. But after MacArthur led UN forces to disaster in North Korea, his continued acts of insubordination grew intolerable. All through the winter and spring of 1950–51, MacArthur issued a series of provocative statements, which Secretary of State Dean Acheson referred to as the general’s “posterity papers.” MacArthur wanted to shift the

Paratroopers of the 187th (regimental combat Team) descend from c-119 planes south of Munsan, korea, to cut off retreating enemy units on March 23, 1951. (National Archives/Department of Defense)

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mccArthyiSm reevAluAted in light of new evidence senator Joseph Mccarthy’s explosive charges of communist spying in the federal government bitterly divided americans during the korean war. a half-century later, thanks to the release of new documentary sources in both washington and Moscow, Mccarthy’s charges have reawakened the interest of historians. The most important of these new sources are the Moscow archives of the kgB (the soviet foreign intelligence agency) and the materials contained in the Venona Project files, released in washington by the u.s. national security agency in 1995. Venona was the code name of a top-secret cold war intelligence project designed to decrypt thousands of elaborately coded telegraphic cables between Moscow and its embassy and consulates in the united states that had been intercepted by the u.s. army’s signal intelligence service during and immediately after world war ii. The new sources offer conclusive proof that Julius rosenberg, executed in 1953 on espionage charges, did indeed pass u.s. nuclear secrets to the soviets during world war ii. They also strongly suggest that alger hiss, a state department official in the 1930s and 1940s, also was guilty of espionage. altogether, nearly 300 americans have been shown to be involved, to varying degrees, in soviet espionage efforts in the years leading up to and during world war ii. at the same time, Venona and the Moscow archives discredit Mccarthy’s charges that in 1950 the federal government was still honeycombed with spies. in a 1951 memorandum uncovered in the Moscow archives, kgB officials acknowledged to their superiors that they, in fact, no longer had any significant sources within the u.s. government: “The most serious drawback in organizing intelligence in the u.s. is . . . the lack of agents in the state department, intelligence service, counterintelligence service, and other most important u.s. governmental institutions.”

blame for the debacle in Korea from his own shoulders to those of the Truman administration. MacArthur repeatedly demanded to bomb Manchuria, blockade the Chinese coast, and deploy Chiang Kai-shek’s soldiers, insisting that otherwise he could not be held responsible for the consequences. Key Republican leaders and conservative newspapers echoed his demands. The fact of the matter was that by giving

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MacArthur a free hand in the autumn of 1950, the administration had wound up with a half-million Chinese soldiers bearing down on the UN forces in Korea. Any further widening of the war was likely to bring in the Soviet Union as well, scare off the support of UN allies, and possibly lead to the outbreak of nuclear war. In December 1950, Truman ordered that all public statements by government and military officials on foreign or military policy had to be cleared by proper authorities in Washington. MacArthur was the clear target of the order. But he would not be silenced and repeatedly ran afoul of the order. Things came to a head at the end of March 1951. On March 14, without consulting anyone, MacArthur issued an ultimatum to the Chinese, threatening them with all-out war if they did not agree to negotiations. He ridiculed their military capability and predicted that “expansion of [UN] military operations to [China’s] coastal areas and interior bases” would “doom Red China to the risk of imminent military collapse.” At that very moment, as MacArthur well knew, Truman had been preparing another offer to the Chinese for negotiations and a cease-fire. MacArthur’s belligerent statement torpedoed any possibility that the Chinese would respond favorably to the president’s offer. According to Dean Acheson, Truman learned of the news “in a state of mind that combined disbelief with controlled fury.” The final straw came on April 5, when the Republican minority leader in the House of Representatives, Congressman Joseph W. Martin, read a letter on the floor of Congress that he had received from MacArthur. Martin had earlier written to MacArthur asking if he agreed that Chinese Nationalist troops should be used to open up a second front against the Communists on China’s mainland. MacArthur wrote back that Martin’s proposal “is in conflict with neither logic nor . . . tradition.” And, he concluded, “There is no substitute for victory.” In other words, the Truman policy of limited war for limited objectives was mistaken. This would be the last time MacArthur would be allowed to challenge the authority of his commander in chief. On April 11, Truman ordered MacArthur relieved of all his commands. At a White House press conference, reporters were handed a statement bearing a terse message from the president: With deep regret I have concluded that General of the Army Douglas MacArthur is unable to give his wholehearted support to the policies of the United States government and of the United

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Nations in matters pertaining to his official duties .  .  . I have decided that I must make a change of command in the Far East. I have, therefore, relieved General MacArthur of his commands. General Ridgway was appointed to MacArthur’s post as UN commander, and Gen. James Van Fleet took over command of the Eighth Army. Due to botched scheduling, Truman’s message was released to the press before a private message could be sent to MacArthur in Tokyo, where he learned of his relief from a radio broadcast. Millions of Americans felt that the president had gravely wronged the hero of Bataan and Inchon. Some 100,000 telegrams poured into the White House, most of them critical of the firing. Gallup polls revealed that the public supported MacArthur over Truman by 69 percent to 29 percent. Conservative newspapers called for Truman’s impeachment. When Truman showed up to throw out the first pitch at the Washington Senators season-opening baseball game in mid-April, he was booed by the fans. On the other hand, U.S. allies were greatly relieved; in Britain there were cheers in the House of Commons when the news of MacArthur’s relief was announced. In Korea, most soldiers just shrugged when they heard the news. Army lieutenant Jim Sheldon remembered: “MacArthur was too distanced from us for his going to make much impact. The only sort of thing we noticed was the food getting better after Ridgway took over.” MacArthur returned home to a hero’s welcome, including a ticker tape parade in New York City that attracted more than 7 million spectators. On April 19, he addressed a joint meeting of Congress, in which he repeated his refrain, “In war, indeed, there can be no substitute for victory.” The speech attracted the largest viewing audience in the history of television up to that time, and millions of Americans were stirred by MacArthur’s conclusion, when he quoted the words of an old army ballad: “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.” And like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away—an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye. A bitter debate over MacArthur’s dismissal followed in hearings over the next two months before the Senate Armed Services and

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on his first visit to the united states in 14 years, gen. douglas Macarthur addresses an audience of 50,000 at soldier’s Field in chicago, april 1951. (National Archives)

Foreign Relations committees. While Truman remained personally unpopular, the American public grudgingly swung around to his side in the dispute. Truman had the support of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who criticized MacArthur’s impetuous strategy in Korea. And even if they did not like the current resident in the White House, most Americans continued to believe that civilian leaders had the constitutional right and responsibility to control the policies carried out by military leaders. Talk of running MacArthur as a Republican presidential candidate against Truman in 1952 soon faded away. For all the fury of political debate during the Korean War over the issues of communist influence in Washington and over MacArthur’s dismissal, most Americans lived through the war years virtually untouched by the conflict. Since young men could avoid or at least delay military service through college deferments, the middle class was by and large spared the experience of seeing its sons sent off to war. Economically, Americans of all classes were doing better than they had in years. They took vacations, went to the movies, and took in a ball game as if there were no war at all. (Boston Red Sox fans were torn between pride and dismay when the team’s star slugger, Ted Williams, was sent to Korea as a pilot with his Marine Corps reserve unit; after

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flying 39 combat missions, Williams returned to finish out the 1953 season, batting over .400 in the 37 games he got to play in.) For civilian consumers, there was no need to choose between guns and butter as there had been during World War II. The United States’s enormous industrial capacity, and the lack of serious economic competition from war-devastated Europe and Japan, fed a consumer boom of unprecedented proportions. The assembly lines of Detroit turned out both tanks and passenger automobiles all through the Korean War. By 1953, the United States, with 6 percent of the world’s population, accounted for about half the world’s production of manufactured goods. After years of economic hard times in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and of the rationing of scarce consumer goods in World War II, Americans were scrambling to make up for lost time in enjoying the good life. They had money to spend. Unemployment, which had stood at close to 5 percent of the workforce in the summer of 1950, dropped to less than 2 percent by 1953. Despite the inflationary pressures brought

Men working on a Ford automobile assembly line (Library of Congress)

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by the war, real wages (the amount of money the average worker brought home, adjusted to account for the cost of living) continued to climb dramatically during the 1950s. And Americans were encouraged to go into debt, as never before in U.S. history, through such innovations as the credit card. The great symbol of U.S. prosperity in the 1950s was the television set, a home entertainment device virtually nonexistent at the end of World War II. During the Korean War years, a majority of Americans first acquired their TVs, and by 1954 two-thirds of U.S. families owned at least one television set. But Korea is not remembered as a “television war” in the way that Vietnam would later be. Television news was in its infancy. Camera equipment was bulky and unreliable, and it took several days to get film out of Korea, processed and onto U.S. screens. Most Americans still got their news of the war from the radio, from newspapers, and from weekly photo magazines like Life. (The photographs taken by David Douglas Duncan of the marines in “Frozen Chosin” and printed in Life stood out for their ability to convey the heroism and tragedy of war.) But for all the limitations of the medium, television did have an impact. Sitting in their own living rooms, Americans now watched

u.s. Marines wounded at kari san Mountain are evacuated via helicopter and flown to a nearby hospital for treatment, May 23, 1951. (National Archives/Department of Defense)

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such leaders as Truman and MacArthur deliver speeches that defined the issues of the war. Documentaries about the fighting, particularly those offered by CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow on his weekly public affairs program See It Now, brought at least some of the realities of combat home to Americans. And television helped to bring an end to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s political influence when it offered continuous coverage of the “Army-McCarthy” hearings in 1954, sessions that revealed the senator at his blustering, bullying worst. As the first anniversary of the North Korean invasion of the South rolled around in June 1951, it was evident that neither side could expect to win any dramatic victory in the war. Early that month, the United States made a quiet diplomatic approach to the Soviets, suggesting that it was time to sit down to negotiations. The Soviets agreed. The Korean War had proven a disaster for the Communists, not just in terms of Kim Il Sung’s thwarted ambition to conquer South Korea, but in stiffening Western resolve to resist Communist expansion. Soviet ambassador to the UN Jacob Malik, in a radio speech on June 23, stated that the Soviet Union wanted to see a cease-fire and settlement of the war. Two days later the official People’s Daily newspaper in Beijing endorsed Malik’s statement. On July 1, the North Koreans agreed to armistice talks. And on July 10 UN and Communist negotiators sat down together in truce talks for the first time in the South Korean city of Kaesong. But the war was not over by any means. Two years of hard fighting and heavy casualties still lay ahead.

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   Negotiators from the UN Command, led by U.S. Navy vice admiral C. Turner Joy, met for the first time with their counterparts from Communist China and North Korea for truce talks on July 10, 1951. They convened in the Communist-controlled city of Kaesong in western South Korea. Any hopes that these talks would bring the killing to an end quickly were soon dashed. The two sides argued endlessly over such issues as the exchange of prisoners of war and the exact location of the truce demarcation line that would in effect become the new border of North and South Korea. The negotiations were in continuous danger of collapse. The Communists broke off the talks in August 1951. Negotiations were not resumed until October of that year in a new location, the village of Panmunjom in southern North Korea. When no substantial progress had been made by October 1952, the UN negotiators walked out. It was not until April of 1953 that the first real breakthrough was made in negotiating an end to the war. In the meantime, fierce fighting continued on the ground and in the air, hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians would lose their lives, and a new administration would take office in Washington with the promise of ending the war. As the second year of the war began in the summer of 1951, the Eighth Army under command of Gen. James Van Fleet was digging in along a defensive line the Americans called “the Kansas Line.” Stretching across the Korean Peninsula, it climbed northeastward from the mouth of the Imjin River south of the 38th parallel, to a point 25 miles north of the 38th parallel on the Korean Peninsula’s eastern coast. A more advanced but less heavily fortified line, known as “Wyoming,” stretched in an arc above the Kansas Line in the western half of the peninsula. The soldiers and marines sheltered in deep bunkers and trenches, protected by barbed wire and minefields, gave the Eighth 104

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one M-46 Patton tank pulls another from the mud on the way to the front, april 1951. (U.S. Army Military History Institute)

Army’s positions the appearance of a World War I battlefront. The Chinese and North Koreans built up similar fortifications on their own side of the line. UN commanders worried that their troops would grow complacent with the start of truce talks. General Van Fleet warned that a “sitdown army” might collapse “at the first sign of an enemy effort.” Van Fleet later complained that UN forces missed an opportunity to drive for a decisive victory in 1951. He wanted to launch new amphibious landings in North Korea to outflank the enemy. But the new Far East commander, General Ridgway, was more cautious than his predecessor, Douglas MacArthur, had been. Remembering the disasters of the previous year, Ridgway reined in his aggressive subordinate. In a memo he wrote in May 1951, Ridgway made it clear that future UN offensives would seek only to deliver “advantages in support of .  .  . diplomatic negotiations.” The Communists had probably drawn similar conclusions after the failure of their spring offensive. Both sides wanted to keep up pressure on their opponent, but the point of the fighting now was not to deliver a knockout blow. Rather, the UN and the Communists each attempted to make limited battlefield gains that could then be used as bargaining chips in the armistice negotiations.

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“germ wArfAre” And communiSt propAgAndA Both sides in the korean war made use of psychological warfare techniques designed to undermine the morale of their enemies. The united states used its command of the skies to drop billions of propaganda leaflets over communist lines urging soldiers to desert, and over north korean cities seeking to undermine civilian morale. radio broadcasts and loudspeaker appeals were also used to influence frontline soldiers. The communists had fewer resources and virtually no successes when it came to influencing frontline soldiers. instead, they concentrated on undermining civilian support for the war effort on the home front. They sought to discredit the un cause by publicizing charges of u.s. atrocities against korean and chinese civilians. in 1951 Beijing radio charged that the united states was using chemical warfare, including “poison gas of an asphyxiating type” dropped from u.s. aircraft and employed against soldiers and civilians. The united states denied the charges, and most accounts of the war accept that they had no merit. in 1952 the communists launched a new propaganda offensive, this time charging that the united states was conducting “germ warfare.” using coerced confessions from u.s. pilots they had taken prisoner, the communists charged in the united nations that u.s. planes were dropping bacterial agents over the north korean and chinese countryside. anthrax, plague, cholera, encephalitis, meningitis, and smallpox, as well as plant and animal diseases, were allegedly being spread by means of diseased insects, spiders, ticks, and rodents. The united states again vehemently denied the charges. although the u.s. military was secretly experimenting with biological warfare techniques (helped in this endeavor by captured Japanese officers who had conducted experiments with spreading diseases such as bubonic plague in Manchuria during the war), no credible evidence has been produced that the united states actually employed such methods in the korean war.

Although by the summer of 1951 the Korean War was being fought for limited aims, it still proved extremely costly in human life. In June the United Nations launched a new offensive called Piledriver, pushing north from the Kansas Line. Despite strong Chinese resistance and unfavorable weather, the Eighth Army reached the base of the Com-

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crew members of company d, 89th Tank Battalion, give first aid to wounded soldiers, during action against chinese communist forces northeast of seoul, korea, May 1, 1951. (National Archives/Department of Defense)

munist stronghold in the Iron Triangle region. The anniversary of the North Korean invasion, June 25, saw UN forces controlling a swath of North Korean territory averaging about 10 miles deep, north of the 38th parallel. Operation Piledriver gave the UN control of east-west roads along which the Communists had previously been able to shift troops easily. But Van Fleet was disappointed by the Eighth Army’s failure to capture the stubbornly defended Iron Triangle. The Eighth Army resumed the offensive in mid-August, concentrating on a limited sector of the battlefront east of the Iron Triangle. Van Fleet wanted to keep up pressure on the Communists, while spoiling any plans they had to launch their own offensive. UN and Communist forces battled for control of the hills that rose above a circular valley called the Punchbowl, 15 miles northeast of the Hwachon Reservoir. The North Koreans held the high ground, from which they could direct artillery fire against the UN positions on the Kansas Line. ROK troops led off the assault, followed by the marines of the 1st Division and soldiers from the 2nd U.S. Infantry Division. Another hillside that became

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known as Bloody Ridge was cleared by the Americans, bunker by bunker, with grenades and flamethrowers. By early September Bloody Ridge was in UN hands, at a cost of 2,700 casualties. A monthlong battle followed for control of Heartbreak Ridge, costing the U.S. 2nd Division 3,700 casualties. That fall, the U.S. 1st Cavalry also took heavy casualties in fighting near the town of Sangnyong, farther to the west. In November the Eighth Army offensive ground to a halt. Many weary veterans of the fighting were at last withdrawn from Korea. The 1st Cavalry, which would suffer four times as many casualties in the 16 months it was in action in the Korean War than it did in all of World War II, was sent back to Japan in December. The 24th Infantry Division, the first U.S. military unit to fight in Korea, followed it to Japan in January 1952. There were also several important changes in command in the next year. In May 1952, General Ridgway stepped down as commander in chief of the Far East Command and the United Nations Command to take over the post of NATO commander in Europe. (The previous NATO commander, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, resigned to run as the Republican candidate for president.) Gen. Mark Clark, who had commanded U.S. troops in Italy during World War II, succeeded Ridgway as Far East and UN commander. And in February 1953, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, commander of the 101st Airborne Division during World War II, succeeded General Van Fleet as commander of the Eighth Army in Korea. The United Nations would not launch another major offensive in the ground war. The Chinese went on the offensive several times, in the fall of 1952 and the spring of 1953, but their advances were contained without significant loss of territory. While the war receded from the headlines in U.S. newspapers, American lives continued to be lost in small-scale engagements, on patrols and in artillery attacks. (This is the period of the war depicted in the popular television series M*A*S*H.) However, one of the fiercest battles of the war came in the waning months of the conflict, when the Chinese attacked the UNheld “Pork Chop Hill” on the eastern side of the Iron Triangle. The U.S. 7th Infantry Division bore the brunt of the attack in July 1953. The Americans inflicted thousands of casualties on the Communists, but in the end the scarred and useless hill was abandoned to the enemy. President Truman wanted to contain the Communists in Korea with a minimal expenditure of American lives. That led to a decision in 1951 to step up air operations against the Communists. The U.S. Air

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although the truce talks began in July 1951, u.s. troops continued to fight and spent considerable time and effort digging into their positions in the hills of northern korea. (Getty Images)

Force and naval and Marine Corps fliers provided close air support of ground troops, flying thousands of missions over the battlefront to bomb and strafe enemy troop concentrations and supply lines. These were known as tactical air operations. U.S. airmen also flew strategic bombing missions, designed to weaken the ability of the Communists to continue the war, through attacks on factories, power plants, transportation, and communication systems; they also bombed some civilian population centers in North Korea. Virtually unopposed over the skies of South Korea, UN airmen faced heavy antiaircraft fire and enemy fighters over North Korea. The Korean War saw the first aerial combat between jet fighters. The U.S. pilots were far more successful in these battles than their Communist opponents. In May 1951, air force captain James Jabara became the world’s first jet ace when he added two more kills to the four MiGs he had already shot down. (An “ace” is a fighter pilot who shoots down five enemy planes.) Jabara would shoot down nine more MiGs by the end of the war, for a total of 15. All told, U.S. pilots would down more than 950 enemy aircraft during the war. The United States suffered

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the loss of 147 aircraft in aerial combat and more than 1,000 other airplanes to ground fire, mechanical failure, or other causes. (Among other pilots who lost their lives was air force captain James A. Van Fleet, Jr., son of the Eighth Army commander, who was shot down over North Korea in April 1952.) The United Nations launched a major air offensive in May 1952, seeking to break the stalemate in negotiations at Panmunjom. Among the targets they hit were the hydroelectric power stations on the Yalu River. Ninety percent of electrical power capacity was destroyed in two days of attacks. Pyongyang and other North Korean cities were flattened in air attacks. And in the last months of the war, the UN Air Force attacked irrigation dams in North Korea in an effort to destroy the country’s rice crop. Despite the massive destruction from the air, there is little evidence that these attacks hastened the end of the war. As had been true in World War II, and would again be proven in Vietnam, bombers were effective when used to support ground troops, but of limited value when used as a strategic weapon.

B-29 superfortresses from the Far east air Force’s Bomber command drop their loads on north korean targets. (U.S. Army Military History Institute)

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The fate of prisoners of war (POWs) was one of the most controversial issues of the Korean War and proved a major stumbling block in the Panmunjom negotiations. Atrocities against enemy captives were committed by both sides. The ROKs were notorious for their brutal treatment of both enemy soldiers and of civilians suspected of supporting the communists. And in the heat of battle, U.S. soldiers sometimes ignored the Geneva conventions, the international agreements that are intended to protect POWs. Angered at the loss of friends in battle or finding prisoners an inconvenient burden, Americans in some instances shot the North Koreans and Chinese who fell into their hands. But if the prisoners taken by Americans survived their capture, their subsequent treatment and chances of survival were relatively good. That was not the case for those Americans and other UN soldiers who were captured by the Communists. More than 8,000 Americans were listed as missing in action during the Korean War. Many of them were killed in combat and simply unaccounted for in the confusion of battle. Slightly fewer than 400 Americans are known to have died in captivity, but there may have been thousands of others whose deaths in captivity went unrecorded. The North Koreans became notorious for their brutal treatment of prisoners after advancing UN forces stumbled on the remains of mass executions of U.S. soldiers in the early days of the war. Other UN prisoners died of starvation, exposure, or execution on long marches to the North Korean prison camps near the Yalu River. Philip Deane, a British journalist captured early in the war, witnessed a terrible scene in October 1950, as he marched in a column of prisoners to the rear. The English-speaking North Korean officer in charge, called “the Tiger” by the prisoners, had forbidden anyone from dropping out of the line of march. When prisoners continued to fall by the wayside from exhaustion, he announced he would kill one of the U.S. officers, Texas-born army lieutenant Cordus H. Thornton, for disobeying orders. As Deane reported, the Tiger taunted Thornton: “That is what would happen in the American Army also, is it not?” “In the American Army, sir, there would be a trial.” The Tiger turned to the assembled Korean soldiers. “I have the authority to kill him. He has disobeyed orders. What must I do?” “Kill him,” screamed the soldiers, “kill them all.”

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KoRean WaR “You see,” said the major to Lieutenant Thornton, “you have had your trial, a People’s Trial, People’s Justice. Now I will kill you.” “In Texas,” said Thornton, a tone of contempt in his voice, “we call that lynching, not justice.”

The major blindfolded Thornton, then shot him in the back of the neck with a pistol. Thornton’s body was left in a ditch. Americans who fell into Chinese hands were somewhat luckier. In the early days of the war, the Chinese actually released some of the Americans they took prisoner after giving them a meal and cigarettes. (The purpose of such generosity was to undermine the morale of U.S. troops, making them more likely to surrender when they learned of Chinese leniency.) The Chinese took thousands of prisoners during their November–December offensive in 1950; many would be held in POW camps along the Yalu River for the next two and a half years. No Americans ever managed to escape from these camps; since there was no neutral or friendly territory nearby for the UN prisoners to escape to, the communists did not even bother putting up fences around their camps. For the most part the prisoners were not beaten or tortured, but food was scarce and medical care virtually nonexistent. As a result,

Four north korean soldiers are taken prisoner. (National Archives)

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Five former Pows—three americans and two australians—warm themselves after being returned unharmed to the allied lines by chinese soldiers. (Lyndon Baines Johnson Library & Museum)

nearly four out of every 10 UN soldiers known to have been taken as POWs died in captivity. The Chinese also set about to convert their prisoners through systematic “reeducation.” Prisoners were required to sit through endless lectures on the virtues of the communist system and the evils of capitalism and imperialism. The Chinese proved skillful at breaking down the loyalties and sense of solidarity that had sustained prisoners in earlier wars. The Communists launched an international propaganda campaign in 1952, charging that the United States was dropping bacteria from the air over North Korea to spread disease. U.S. Air Force crewmen came under intense psychological pressure, called brainwashing, to admit that they had been shot down while engaged in “germ warfare.” Several hundred POWs gave in to such pressures, either convinced that the charges were true or hoping to gain better treatment; some made broadcasts or wrote statements for the Communists. After the war, 14 American POWs would be court-martialed by the army for collaborating with the enemy. In the case of 21 Americans, Communist brainwashing proved

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north korean and chinese prisoners of war (National Archives)

so effective that at the end of the war they refused repatriation and stayed to live in China. UN forces captured 170,000 North Korean and Chinese prisoners. Many of them were held on an island off the southeast coast of the Korean Peninsula called Koje-do. The Communists managed to turn the camps into another front in the war against the United Nations. Some Communists deliberately allowed themselves to be captured. They set up resistance organizations among the prisoners. Radios were smuggled into POW compounds, allowing the resistance movement to communicate with Communist leaders in North Korea. U.S. and ROK guards controlled the perimeters of the camp, but they could not control what went on inside the compound. When U.S. troops moved into the camp in February 1952 to reassert control, a riot broke out in which 77 prisoners and one U.S. soldier were killed. An international uproar ensued over charges of inhumane treatment of the prisoners. In May, the Communists managed to seize U.S. brigadier general Francis T. Dodd, the camp commander, and held him hostage until the United States agreed to improve conditions in camp. When U.S. troops again moved into the compound to reassert control, the resulting battle cost

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u.S. pows in the KoreAn wAr in the early months of the war, u.s. and other un prisoners taken by the north koreans could expect harsh treatment at the hands of their captors, often including the summary execution of the wounded or the sick. conditions varied from moment to moment, depending on the whim of local north korean commanders. in one notorious “death march” that took place in november 1950, 130 of the 700 Pows who set off on a 120-mile forced march were killed by north korean guards before they reached their destination—more than one dead man per mile along the line of the march. By the spring of 1951 the chinese had taken custody of all un prisoners. in some ways conditions improved; the prisoners were held in camps where there was less chance of random executions. But mistreatment took on a more systematic, purposeful character. The chinese treated the prisoners under their control as a resource to be exploited for propaganda purposes. They used physical and psychological mistreatment to secure both converts and “confessions.” The term brainwashing came into wide usage during and after the korean war to (continues)

Recently repatriated in the UN POW exchange, POWs pose for a group photograph with their flight nurses at Tachikawa Air Base, Japan. (National Archives)

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(continued) describe the manipulation of u.s. prisoners for political ends. Prisoners were divided by nationality, rank, and the degree to which they were regarded as potentially sympathetic. Privileges and punishments were doled out depending on how cooperative an individual prisoner proved. The communists sought to wear down prisoner morale through isolation, anti-un and anti-american lectures, and other methods. some prisoners, especially pilots, were singled out for often brutal interrogations in the hopes of producing statements confessing war crimes. of 7,140 u.s. servicemen known to be taken prisoner, at least 2,700 died in captivity.

the lives of 31 POWs and one American. Thousands of spears, knives, and Molotov cocktails (gasoline bombs) were confiscated from the prisoners. When U.S. troops freed Red Army prisoners from Nazi POW camps in World War II, they discovered that some of them did not want to be sent back to the Soviet Union. Returned against their will, many of the Soviet POWs were shipped to prison camps in Siberia or executed. For humanitarian and political reasons the United States adopted a new policy in the Korean War. No Communist prisoners would be repatriated to the North Koreans or Chinese after the war, unless they agreed to go. Many of the North Korean POWs were former ROK soldiers, who preferred to stay in South Korea; many Chinese POWs were former Nationalists who preferred to go to Taiwan. All told, about 50,000 Communist prisoners refused repatriation. In Panmunjom, the Communists at first demanded the return of all their POWs, charging that those refusing repatriation had been pressured to do so by their UN captors. Later, the Communists would accept the principle of voluntary repatriation, but only if the prisoners’ refusals to return to their homelands were verified by officials from a neutral country. Haggling over the details of the repatriation process took up months of negotiations at Panmunjom, while the war dragged on. The unending bloodletting in Korea proved a major issue in the 1952 U.S. presidential campaign. The Republicans, long out of office and hungry for a victory, sought to capitalize on the public’s growing war weariness. President Truman’s standing in public opinion polls

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dropped to record low levels, and in March 1952 he announced that he would not run for reelection. The Democrats nominated Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson in his place. Although Stevenson proved an attractive candidate, he faced a formidable foe in Dwight David Eisenhower. Eisenhower, popularly known as “Ike,” had been commander of Allied forces in the European theater of war during World War II. Eisenhower’s name was bound up with proud memories of the simpler, more clear-cut conflict of the 1940s, when, as MacArthur liked to say, there had been “no substitute for victory.” The Republicans hit hard at the Democrats for supposedly allowing Communists to infiltrate the government and influence foreign policy. Eisenhower did not promise victory in Korea. What he did promise, in a nationally televised speech in October 1952, was that, if elected, he would go to Korea for a firsthand look at the situation. “Only in that way,” he declared, “could I learn how best to serve the American people in the cause of peace.” Eisenhower’s promise was a brilliant campaign gambit, appealing, at the same time, to those who hoped for an increased military

as he promised during the election of 1952, President-elect dwight d. eisenhower visited korea in december 1952. here he reviews south korea’s capitol division both to show continuing u.s. support for south korea and to size up the possibilities for ending the war. (Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum)

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rear adm. John c. daniel waves signed document authorizing the exchange of sick and wounded, april 1953, Panmunjom. (National Archives)

effort in Korea for victory and to those who hoped for an end to the conflict through negotiated settlement. In November 1952, Ike was elected president by a comfortable margin, ending 20 years of Democratic control of the White House. And in December, as U.S. troops prepared to observe their third Christmas in Korea, Ike made good on his campaign promise and visited the battlefront. The trip was a public relations success, convincing the American people that they once again had a decisive leader in charge in Washington. But in reality Eisenhower’s brief visit had little effect on the conduct of either the war or the negotiations. The new administration did not have any better idea of how to end the war than its discredited Democratic predecessor. Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, engaged in some atomic “saber rattling.” Eisenhower’s military advisers considered the use of atomic weapons to break the stalemate, but in the end the president took no steps toward employing them. How seriously the Communists took the threat of nuclear attack remains unknown. The administration did step

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up the scale and intensity of air attacks on North Korea, and that may have had some impact on the Communists’ decision to negotiate. The real breakthrough came in March 1953 after Soviet leader Joseph Stalin died of illness in Moscow. His successors were eager to end the war. On March 28, the Communists indicated willingness to accept an earlier UN proposal for the exchange of sick and wounded prisoners of war. Chinese foreign minister Zhou Enlai announced that his government was willing to reconsider the whole issue of the repatriation of prisoners of war that had led to the impasse in negotiations at Panmunjom. At the end of April, in Operation Little Switch, the communists handed over 684 sick or wounded UN prisoners (including 149 Americans) in exchange for 6,670 sick or wounded communist prisoners held by the United Nations. At the same time negotiations in Panmunjom, which had been suspended since the previous October, resumed. Finally, at the start of June, the communists announced their willingness to accept the principle of no forcible repatriation of unwilling prisoners of war. A last-minute roadblock to the settlement of the war was thrown up by Syngman Rhee. The South Korean leader still clung to his dream of marching north and reunifying all of Korea. He threatened to withdraw ROK forces from UN control and invade the North on his own. Rhee’s threat was mostly bombast. Without U.S. backing, the ROK forces were in no position to take on the Communists, as the Chinese proved in late June when they launched a surprise attack on ROK units near Kumsong, obliterating a ROK division. But Rhee had other weapons at his command. He ordered ROK soldiers to open the gates of the POW camps they controlled. Before the Americans were able to reassert control, 25,000 nonrepatriated prisoners, who were supposed to have been turned over to the custody of a neutral nation commission, simply walked out the gates and blended into the local population. The Communists walked out of the Panmunjom negotiations in outrage. U.S. officials considered overthrowing Rhee’s government, if he continued his sabotage of the peace settlement. In the end, Rhee conceded the inevitable. The Communists returned to the truce table. At 10 a.m. on July 27, 1953, the armistice agreement was signed by Maj. Gen. William K. Harrison, representing the UN forces, and Lt. Gen. Nam Il of the North Korean army. Even then, men continued to die for another 12 hours in artillery barrages, until the truce went into effect at 10 p.m.

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col. James Murray, Jr., u.s. Marine corps, and col. chang chun san of the north korean communist army initial maps showing the north and south boundaries of the demarcation zone during the Panmunjom cease-fire talks. (National Archives)

The Korean War was over, three years and a little more than a month after it had begun. The last two years of fighting in Korea, while the negotiators dickered at Kaesong and Panmunjom, had cost the U.S. more than 63,000 casualties, including 12,300 men killed in action.

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      The Korean War began only five years after World War II, but in some ways it was more like World War I, at least for the last half of the war. There were similar pulverizing artillery barrages against a dug-in enemy, bloody infantry assaults against those dug-in enemies, trenches within speaking distance of the enemy, trench raids at night, thousands of land mines in a no-man’s-land, and some devilish improvised weapons to supplement those land mines. There were, of course, differences between the Korean War and the western front of World War I. Among the biggest were the Korean mountains, especially in the eastern part of the peninsula. Stateside news reports called them “hills,” but many of those “hills” were more than 5,000 feet above sea level. That does not sound high to Americans, because the state of Colorado, for example, is full of mountains that are 10,000 feet above sea level. But the Colorado mountains start from a base that is 6,000 feet above sea level. Those in eastern Korea start at sea level. Mountains affected the way infantry could fight, the way tanks could be used, and how airplanes could strafe ground troops. One of the oddest things about the western front period of the Korean War was that peace talks were being held during the last year of it. Perhaps even odder is that the five months after the peace talks began was one of the bloodiest periods of the war. During this period, U.S. soldiers suffered 22,000 casualties, compared with fewer than 28,000 during the early months, from the North Korean invasion through the Pusan Perimeter fighting, the landing at Inchon, and the push to the Yalu. Odder still is the fact that during this period, a large portion of the U.S. public was hardly aware that a war was still going on. In World War II, the United States and its allies were able to overwhelm the Germans and Italians with superior numbers of both men 122

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and weapons. After the Battle of Midway in June 1942, the United States was also able to confront Japan with more weapons and more troops. The longer the war went on, the greater the imbalance became, especially when the Japanese forces were immobilized on islands scattered all over the Pacific. However, when the North Koreans invaded South Korea, they had more men and more weapons, and, in some cases, better weapons, than the UN forces (U.S. and South Korean troops only at this time). The North Korean spearhead was composed of Russian T-34 tanks—the best of all tanks fielded in World War II. Shells from U.S. 105-mm howitzers exploded harmlessly on the armor of the T-34s. The 2.36inch bazooka rocket, which had devastated German tanks a few years earlier, was equally impotent against the T-34. In addition to the tanks, the North Koreans increased their mobility by using cavalry. The use of horses got much ink in the U.S. press, along with criticism of the U.S. military for stating that Korea was not “tank country” and for having prematurely disbanded the U.S. Cavalry. The U.S. military was probably used to criticism. From early in World War II, general staff officers had been disparaged as old fogies who had fired airpower advocate Billy Mitchell (who had actually voluntarily resigned in disgust when he was frozen in rank for five years) and who did not understand airpower. It was true the surface officers did not understand airpower, but in Korea, their error was that they overestimated the power of aircraft. When the invasion began, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur and his staff thought their planes could stop the North Koreans, who had no effective air cover themselves. Airpower had prevented the Japanese from reinforcing or evacuating islands and outposts in the Pacific. But MacArthur and his people learned that there is a world of difference between inhibiting travel on the open sea and doing the same on a mountainous wooded peninsula. As for the North Korean tanks, they ceased to be a problem shortly after the invasion, when armor-piercing shells for the 105s, as well as good antitank guns, like the three-inch M-5 and the 3.5-inch “super bazooka,” were shipped to Korea. As for cavalry, riding a horse onto a battlefield in Korea, or any place else, was simply another way to commit suicide. It is true that U.S. Special Forces troops would ride horses in Afghanistan, but they did not charge machine guns. Furthermore, they were involved in guerrilla war, and the Korean War was by no means a guerrilla war.

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The North Koreans’ attempt to conquer the entire peninsula was almost successful for a number of reasons: First, when the USSR occupied Korea in 1945, it set up a Russianborn Korean, Kim Il Sung, as dictator and gave him an army of 135,000 men in 10 divisions, including an armored division with T-34 tanks. The North Korean army also had Russian artillery, some of it selfpropelled, Russian rifles, machine guns and submachine guns and mortars, including the excellent Russian 120-mm mortar—more powerful than any U.S. mortar. Second, the United States wanted to limit South Korea to a lightly armed constabulary of 25,000 men, because it feared that the South Korean president, Syngman Rhee, would attack North Korea. When U.S. troops withdrew from Korea, Rhee expanded his army to 100,000 men. But it had no tanks, no effective antitank guns, some obsolete bazookas, and 100 obsolete howitzers. Third, in January 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson declared that the United States would hold a defense perimeter running from the Aleutian Islands, through Japan and the Philippines. Korea was not included. Many U.S. officials seemed to think that if there were another war, it would open with an exchange of atomic bombs. They did not think that Korea would play a vital role in such a war. Fourth, the only U.S. troops available to back up South Korea were in four under-strength divisions scattered around Japan. These were soldiers in the postwar, all-volunteer army. Most of them had joined the army to learn a trade, not to fight a war. They were poorly trained for fighting a war. And much of their equipment had been poorly maintained. The U.S. troops arrived in Korea piecemeal and, at first, without heavy weapons. There were not enough troops to form a continuous line, and the North Koreans repeatedly flanked the units—that is, moved around the sides of these small units. Finally, Lt. General Walton Walker consolidated U.S. and South Korean units into a perimeter around Pusan, the port at the southern tip of Korea. Antitank weapons had arrived, and the U.S. and ROK (Republic of South Korea) troops stopped the North Korean blitz. North Korea had run out of tanks, but its troops still outnumbered the defenders of Pusan and threatened to break through the Pusan Perimeter. UN troops began to arrive at Pusan (this was, theoretically, a UN war). The first contingent was a British unit. Eventually, other nations sent at least token units, although the Turkish force of

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These u.s. amphibious military vehicles are approaching the shore of southern korea in the initial stage of the korean war and would be used again in the daring attack at inchon in september 1950. (Corbis)

more than 5,000 men made significant contributions to the war in Korea. The odds became more even. Now the Americans and South Koreans had tanks and the North Koreans did not. American planes strafed the North Koreans in their fixed positions. Before, the North Koreans had managed to avoid much damage from aircraft by hiding in the woods. The American semiautomatic M-1 (Garand) rifle greatly outclassed the Russian Moisin-Nagant bolt action rifle. The Americans introduced the .30 carbine with an infrared projector and a sight that could see by that invisible light. This M-3 “sniperscope” served the U.S. forces all through the war, but the sniperscope was as conspicuous as a searchlight on a dark night and became obsolete when other countries began issuing sights that could see infrared light. Then came the Americans’ amphibious assault on the northern port of Inchon. It was a runaway success—literally, as the North Koreans stampeded north with U.S. troops at their rear. The UN troops under MacArthur engaged in an almost equally disorganized pursuit. And then four Chinese field armies entered Korea and slipped between the UN units. The “yo-yo war” (“I been up and down

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inSide inchon The landing at inchon was a brilliant feat, not just because overcoming the north korean resistance was a tough job, but because Mother nature presented such a daunting obstacle. The tides at inchon were extraordinary—about 29 feet between high and low tides. when the tide was out, there were six miles of mudflats extending from shore. a landing craft could not sail over them, neither could the amphibious vehicles known as “ducks.” it was doubtful if even an amphibious tank could cross them. infantry trying to wade through them could be cut down in droves. a landing, it would seem, would have to be accomplished in a very short time. That much was known about inchon. unknown was the strength of the north korean forces in the area, the feelings of the civilian population, the angles of incline on the beaches, and how difficult it would be to get over the seawalls behind the beaches. To get answers, Macarthur chose eugene clark, a 39-year-old naval lieutenant who had worked his way up from seaman. clark was in the geographic Branch of Macarthur’s staff. he and two south korean intelligence officers sneaked into inchon harbor on a south korean naval gunboat. after the boat docked at an offshore island, five north korean soldiers there tried to get away, but a south korean machine gunner killed them—accidentally, as clark had wanted to question them.

this peninsula like a yo-yo,” the old soldiers told replacements) again changed directions. This time the retreat down the peninsula was worse. The Chinese poured more armies into Korea from Manchuria—in such numbers that they were called a “human sea.” It was winter, and winter in Korea is ferocious. The UN troops lacked warm clothing and hot meals. Units lost touch with one another. Medical treatment was inadequate. In short, Douglas MacArthur, America’s greatest war hero, seemed unable to manage the retreat. Then the field commander of the Eighth Army, Gen. Walton Walker, was killed in a jeep accident. MacArthur hit the panic button. On November 28, 1950, he told the Joint Chiefs of Staff that his forces “were not sufficient to meet this undeclared war by the Chinese. This command has done everything humanly possible within its capabilities but is now faced with condi-

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it turned out that the north koreans had drafted all the ablebodied young men in the area, but clark and his associates, Lt. youn Joung and col. ke in-Ju, were able to recruit the local teenage boys and a few oldsters who captained boats, some of which may have been pirates’ ships. another recruit was a young widow who was the mistress of a north korean officer. youn and ke talked to all the villagers on the island and on the other islands in the harbor they reached with their small navy. clark and youn explored the mudflats and the shore fortifications personally, wading on the flats at night and swimming right under the north korean gun positions. They and their teenage army attacked a north korean headquarters on another island and tried to capture a particularly brutal north korean commanding officer, but he was killed accidentally by his own men as clark’s team was trying to get him to one of their boats. The north koreans had no naval strength in inchon, but they commandeered fishing and commercial junks to land troops on the island clark and the two korean officers had captured. a junk naval battle ensued, and the .50 caliber machine gun of clark’s team proved decisive. eventually, the north koreans did invade the island, but by that time, clark and the two korean officers were on the mainland with a south korean resistance group. They would be evacuated by the ships that took in the landing party. clark received the silver star for his exploit and oak leaf clusters for it after other cloak-and-dagger exploits.

tions beyond its control and strength.” On December 3, MacArthur said that if he did not quickly get heavy reinforcements, he would be driven to a tiny beachhead, and there, “faced with the entire Chinese nation,” his army would be destroyed. On December 30, he proposed blockading Chinese ports and bombing China’s factories (with nuclear bombs, if necessary). In fact, China got most of its military aid from the Soviet Union, which had an enormously long land border with China that could not be blockaded, and in 1950, China’s factories did not amount to much. MacArthur did not get heavy reinforcements. He got something much more valuable—Gen. Matthew Bunker Ridgway, who took over Walker’s command. Ridgway reorganized the Eighth Army and got rid of some officers. The commander of x Corps, Lt. Gen. Edward M. Almond, who was also MacArthur’s chief of staff, had been a recurring

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u.s. helicopters came into their own in the korean war, lifting wounded or surrounded troops out of isolated locales or, as here, rescuing a downed american pilot. (U.S. Air Force)

pain to Walker. Ridgway told Almond in no uncertain terms that x Corps was part of the Eighth Army, not an independent command, and its operations would be coordinated with those of the Eighth Army. “Almond came out of that meeting a very sober guy,” said the x Corps deputy chief of staff, Col. William McCaffrey. Ridgway got his troops off the roads and into the hills. There would be no more infiltration through Eighth Army lines. Ridgway got field hospitals nearer to the front lines, and he instituted helicopter evacuation for wounded soldiers. He made sure the troops got winter clothes and had hot meals brought to them whenever possible. Morale of the Eighth Army, which had been close to rock bottom, shot up. The Chinese armies had primitive logistics. They periodically outran their supplies and had to stop and reequip themselves. Ridgway used these pauses to prepare a new offensive. The idea was to use U.S. advantage—firepower—to the maximum. Occupying territory was

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not important. The important thing was killing Chinese and North Korean troops. Ridgway worked tirelessly to prepare what he called Operation Killer. When the counteroffensive was scheduled to begin, January 22, 1951, MacArthur, who had spent almost no time in Korea before, showed up with a bevy of war correspondents. “I have just ordered a resumption of the offensive,” said the man who had told Washington that his army was about to be pushed into a tiny beachhead and wiped out. In the first week of Operation Killer, Ix Corps killed 5,000 Chinese while losing only a few of its men. The Chinese retreated, a new experience for them, but they left some of their bravest soldiers on the line to delay pursuit. These fought almost to the last man so that their comrades could get away. The Americans used masses of artillery and continual air strikes to live up to the operation’s name. Before Ridgway took command, the South Korean army troops had been a problem: They simply were not effective. Under Ridgway, they became first-class soldiers. The 1st Battalion of their 2nd Regiment wiped out an entire Chinese battalion without losing a man. Ridgway continued to push north, slowly and bloodily. The Chinese and North Koreans resisted fiercely. The Chinese attempted a counterattack, but it was repulsed. Ridgway continued advancing. Korea was not blitzkrieg country—the “lightning war” introduced by the Germans in World War II with their fast-moving tanks: Tanks cannot climb mountains. But Ridgway’s forces used tanks anyway. They ran tanks up the narrow valleys in eastern Korea while North Koreans tried to blast them with 45-mm, 57-mm, and 100-mm antitank guns from the mouths of caves dug in the side of mountains. In Korea, tanks were seldom the breakthrough weapon. The infantry accompanied the armor and, in many cases, prepared the way for the tanks; the tanks then provided firepower for the infantry. Although the U.S. Army dispatches called the opposing forces Chinese to foster the notion that MacArthur had wiped out the North Korean army after the Inchon landing, in fact they were North Koreans who built bunkers on the mountaintops and mountain sides. Bunkers were pits covered with logs and earth—almost invisible and invulnerable to anything less than a direct hit from a high-velocity tank gun. Air strikes were difficult in the mountains, especially for jet fighters. The mountains were high; their sides were steep and the valleys

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were narrow—often too narrow for high-speed jets to maneuver in. Aircraft carrier–based Corsair fighters (propeller planes) were better for strafing in the mountains. There were Chinese and North Korean fighter planes, but they never ventured far enough south to give their soldiers any support. They stayed north, where they were shot down in large numbers. While the UN meat–grinder offensive was inching north, MacArthur decided that he, not the president nor Congress, was the one who set U.S. policy in the Far East. When he advocated invading China, he was removed from command. Ridgway replaced him, and Lt. Gen. James Van Fleet became Eighth Army commander. Under Van Fleet, the Eighth Army took the appropriately named Bloody Ridge and Heartbreak Ridge and an ancient, extinct, milewide crater called the Punchbowl. Then the bogged-down peace talks

SAndbAg cAStle The Turkish Brigade, famous for its aggressiveness, was attached to the 25th infantry division when the “Tropic Lightning” division (a nickname of the 25th) was holding heartbreak ridge and the Punchbowl. orders came down from headquarters that there were to be no more advances. all troops were to stay in their fortifications, except for patrols, which would always return to where they started from. The Turks agreed that they would not leave their trenches except for patrolling. They did not—but they extended their trenches toward the north korean lines. They held a section of heartbreak ridge that overlooked a finger of land extending north. every night, the Turks would dig a short section of trench along that finger. They covered the trench by laying steel fence posts across it and covering them with sandbags. every few feet, they dug short trenches extending out from the main trench under construction. when the main trench got to within 10 yards of the enemy line, orders came down definitely and unequivocally to sToP. stop digging; stop advancing. so they built a thick-walled sandbag bunker at the end of the trench against the remains of a tree. The division gave it official status by calling it “Listening Post alice.” But the troops called it “sandbag castle.” The Turks had just finished their “castle” when they were moved to another part of the line. The 27th regiment inherited sandbag castle.

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seemed to be reviving, so the Eighth Army stopped advancing. That led to the strange structure called Sandbag Castle. The advance stopped, but the fighting did not. Before the armistice was finally signed, the Chinese launched several offensives, but they achieved nothing at the cost of many lives. They also launched many company- or battalion-size attacks that achieved even less. The United States contributed to the eventual body count with what were called “contact patrols.” In a contact patrol, you approached the enemy line, usually at night, and opened fire. The enemy fired back. Then you withdrew. The ostensible reason was to see if the enemy was still there. General Van Fleet gave the real reason for such patrols: “A sit-down army is subject to collapse at the first sign of an enemy effort.” He gave no example of this ever happening. “I couldn’t allow my forces to become soft and dormant,” he went on. Instead, he got a lot of them dead. Manning the “castle” was an unusual experience for the u.s. troops. They could hear the north koreans talking—sometimes in english. “hey gi! what time is?” was a frequent call. Most contacts were not friendly. north korean patrols attacked frequently and were driven back. a few times, they got into the covered trenches and were driven out by gis fighting on their hands and knees. on the night of september 10, 1952, the north koreans decided to eliminate sandbag castle. They fired 1,200 mortar shells, 800 of them 120-mm shells, at the castle’s bunkers and tunnels and attacked with an infantry battalion. The north korean soldiers crawled over the terrain carrying demolition charges almost under their own mortar fire. They surrounded the forward bunker. corporal Benito Martinez, a machine gunner, told the other troops to crawl back through the tunnel while there was still time. Martinez stayed with this gun, cutting down the attackers. Martinez’s platoon leader told him to come back, but the corporal said he would stay and delay the north koreans as long as possible. he was still firing as dawn broke, but eventually the north koreans reached his position. Martinez was awarded the Medal of honor posthumously. Lt. Thomas McLean led four counterattacks and was wounded each time. he was awarded the silver star. The fight did not break off abruptly. it tapered off. it did not break off because the north koreans never withdrew. They all died on the slopes around sandbag castle.

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Lines of trenches and bunkers now divided the Korean Peninsula from sea to sea. Most of the Eighth Army was dug-in in what had been prewar North Korea. Americans and their allies manned “fighting bunkers” on the forward slopes of mountain- and hilltops. Between the bunkers ran communications trenches. The troops lived in other bunkers on the reverse slopes. American bunkers, built of logs and sandbags, were more conspicuous then North Korean or Chinese bunkers, which were covered with earth. Dirt was a good camouflage material because almost all vegetation was soon blasted off the mountaintops. In front of all these fortifications were tens of thousands of land mines—small mines to kill or maim enemy soldiers, large mines to blow up vehicles. Buried along with the mines were devices such as the Husch flare, invented by a U.S. Army lieutenant of that name. The Husch flare

Jet fighter plAneS Probably the most significant addition to the world’s armory during the korean war was the jet fighter plane. To be sure, the first such plane was actually introduced by the germans in world war ii, but this Messerschmitt (M-262) appeared in the skies so late that it had no impact either on the air war or in the war’s outcome. however, the world’s major air forces got the message: The future lay in jet planes. Their chief difference from propeller planes was the greater speed they could attain, speed that an experienced fighter pilot could convert into a considerable advantage in aerial combat. The u.s. air Force went to work and produced its F-80 shooting star, and this was ready when the war broke out in korea. as advanced as it was, the soviets had come up with an even better jet fighter, the Mig-15. its swept-back wing gave it greater speed than the F-80, and it had another advantage: it could fly at a considerably higher altitude. This meant that whenever a Mig pilot felt threatened by an american jet, he had only to head higher. as it happened, in what was the first jet-to-jet aerial dogfight in history, in november 1950 an american pilot came upon two Migs and, catching them by surprise, was able to shoot down both. But for the first months of the war, the Migs outmaneuvered american jets until early in 1951, when the u.s. air Force introduced the F-86 sabrejet. From that point on, american pilots were able to compete successfully against the Migs.

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was an oil barrel filled with napalm, hand grenades, and a half-pound block of TNT with a blasting cap and a friction igniter. From the igniter ran a series of trip wires. An enemy tripping on the wire would trigger an explosion that threw liquid fire over a wide area and set off dozens of secondary explosions as the hand grenades went off. The Communist forces never stopped digging. They dug tunnels completely through the mountains and installed direct-fire antitank guns in them. They built underground command posts; they put their mortars in deep pits. From the top of Heartbreak Ridge, an observer could see North Korean trenches as far back as five miles from the front. The Communist forces had far more soldiers to man those fortifications, of course, and they did not man them all at the same time. American tanks frequently fired on the forward enemy bunkers, so the

The Migs that appeared in the korean war had been given to the north koreans by their communist supporters, the soviet union. and although they denied it at the time, the russians also provided many of the pilots, some of them experienced world war ii aces. But in aerial battles that sometimes involved more than 100 jet planes, both u.s. and foreign pilots, drawing on their skills and daring, proved that jet planes would rule the air from that time on.

F-86 Sabrejets such as these were available in Korea early in 1951, and from that point on U.S. pilots were able to more than match the Russian MiGs that the North Koreans put in the air. (U.S. Air Force)

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enemy often avoided some of them and stayed farther to the rear. They did use the forward bunkers for sniping and harassing machine-gun fire as well as observing mortar fire. Mortar bombardment of the front lines was almost continuous. Both sides used shells filled with high explosive and white phosphorus, which blinds the enemy with thick white smoke and injures him with burning fragments not easily extinguished. Sometimes the North Koreans filled their shells with propaganda leaflets. Loudspeakers were another propaganda medium used by the North Koreans. Opposing lines in the eastern mountains were often quite close. The Americans hauled their tanks up to the mountaintops and used the tanks’ 90-mm and 76-mm guns for direct fire. In some areas, tankers used their big guns for sniping at unbelievable ranges. For example, an artillery forward observer would pick out a tree, rock, or some other landmark on a trail miles to the enemy’s rear. He and a tanker would calculate how long it would take a shell to reach that trail and how far a man could walk in that time. The tanker would aim his cannon at a point that far ahead of the landmark. When an enemy soldier walked past the landmark, the tanker would fire at the predetermined point, and the soldier and the shell would meet there. The Chinese and North Koreans did not have the numbers of tanks that the UN forces did, but they used their 45-mm antitank guns for similar long-range sniping. The 45-mm was a bit too light to be a modern antitank gun, but it was sufficient for this sort of long-range sniping. Another weapon they used was the Soviet PTRD antitank rifle. This was a single-shot, bolt-action rifle; it was 84 inches long and weighed about 21 pounds. The gunner simply put a cartridge in the chamber and closed the bolt. For a single-shot weapon, it had a high rate of fire, as well as far more range than an ordinary rifle. The Chinese got some interesting weapons from the Soviet Union, but they did not get enough of them. A typical action in this period of the war was one of many attacks on a U.S. army company-size outpost near Kumhwa. This night, the outpost was held by the weapons company of the 3rd Battalion of the 27th “Wolfhound” Regiment, which was equipped with the old, water-cooled Browning machine guns. When the sun came up the next morning, the defenders of the outpost found about a battalion of dead Chinese on the ground. Some of them had no guns. Instead, they wore a sort of apron with pockets in it con-

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taining six stick-handled hand grenades—a weapon they never got a chance to use. Because they had much less firepower than the U.N forces, the Communists usually attacked at night. Korea, like Japan, has a wet climate, which means that the nights are often cloudy. There were, of course, no houselights or streetlights at the MLR (main line of resistance). With no light from the Moon or stars, it was very dark indeed. And with no light, the advantage of having more guns vanishes. So the Americans created “artificial moonlight” by aiming powerful searchlights at the clouds. The clouds reflected a dim, diffused light. It was a long way from daylight or even the light from a full moon, but it let the UN gunners see shapes they could fire at. There were these several innovations and improvisations, then, in the weaponry used in the Korean Wear but—with the significant exception of the jet plane—there was little in Korean War weaponry that differed greatly from that of World War II. However, the conditions and challenges that confronted those weapons—in particular, the mountains and the mass Chinese attacks—called for tactics that made for a quite different war.

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  The war in Korea was over. Korea, “Land of the Morning Calm,” was in ruins. No one knows exactly how many people died in the war. Total U.S. casualties for the war were 54,246 dead (of whom 33,629 died on the battlefield, the rest of wounds, accidents, or other causes) and 103,284 wounded. ROK Armed Forces lost 59,000 killed. The Chinese and North Koreans lost an estimated half-million soldiers killed in action. Civilian deaths in South and North Korea may have topped 2 million. All wars bring human suffering, but seldom have so many suffered to gain so little. At the end of the war, the border between North and South Korea was reestablished, along roughly the same line where it had been in June 1950. The Communist leader Kim Il Sung remained in power in North Korea, and the anticommunist leader Syngman Rhee remained in power in South Korea. True, South Korea had been saved from Communist domination, and the United Nations had acted collectively to deter aggression; but no precedent was set in international relations. It would be 40 years before the UN Security Council would again agree to intervene militarily to roll back an act of aggression—by Iraq against Kuwait. In determining responsibility for the war and its suffering, the greatest portion of blame must fall on Kim Il Sung for ordering the invasion of South Korea. Even though the Korean War was not, as believed at that time in Washington, the opening maneuver of a well-thought-out conspiracy by Joseph Stalin to conquer the West, the Soviet dictator was guilty of giving the North Koreans the go-ahead to pursue their irresponsible adventure. As for the Chinese Communists, they cannot be held responsible for the early phase of the war: They played a minor role in North Korea’s decision to go to war, and they provided the West 136

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with ample warning of their intention to intervene in the conflict if hostile forces approached the Yalu River. But if the Chinese had halted their advance in January 1951, when they drove UN forces out of North Korea, they might possibly have shortened the war by years. The United States can be faulted for its willingness to tolerate the undemocratic excesses of Syngman Rhee’s government in the years leading up to the North Korean invasion. As was the case in many other regions of the world, in South Korea, U.S. policy makers proved blind to any consideration other than the degree of anticommunism displayed by the regime in power. But recognizing that Rhee’s government was a dictatorship does not mean that Kim Il Sung invaded South Korea because he wanted to bring its people democratic liberties. The North Korean dictatorship was far more efficient and ruthless in suppressing democratic dissent than Syngman Rhee ever dreamed of. In an imperfect world, presented with a difficult and dangerous situation in 1950, President Truman acted responsibly in his decision to intervene and in seeking UN sanction for his intervention. Much less defensible is the amount of leeway he permitted his commander in the region, General MacArthur, in shaping U.S. policy. The

u.S. mediA And the KoreAn wAr as had been the case in world war ii, americans got most of their news about the korean war from newspapers and magazines. Television was still in its infancy, and newsreel films took days to reach movie theaters in the united states. also, as in world war ii, and unlike Vietnam, relations between journalists and the military were marked by a high level of cooperation. Few u.s. reporters sent to cover the war doubted the justice of the united nations cause, and they willingly accepted military censorship of their dispatches in the name of protecting the security of u.s. troops. david douglas duncan’s photographs and reporting for Life magazine, reprinted in the 1951 book This Is War, set a high standard for gritty realistic journalism. The frontline reporting of the invasion of inchon and the retreat from hungnam by Marguerite higgins, a reporter for a new york city newspaper, cleared the way for later generations of female war correspondents. as always, reporting on war was a dangerous business: 10 american war correspondents were killed, and one american photographer was captured by the chinese and spent two and half years in a prisoner-of-war camp.

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war could have been brought to a successful close almost three years earlier, had Truman displayed the wisdom and political courage to halt the UN advance at the 38th parallel, heeding Chinese warnings and ignoring MacArthur’s reckless promises of glorious victories to come. A decision to end the war in September 1950 could have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Asians and tens of thousands of Americans. It might, conceivably, have saved the Truman presidency from disgrace and the Democrats from political defeat in 1952. The Korean War left the Korean people more divided than ever. Political change was slow in coming to the troubled Korean Peninsula. Syngman Rhee continued his dictatorial rule in the South until he was overthrown in a student-inspired uprising in 1960. Despite political reforms in the 1980s, South Korea had still not shaken off the legacy of authoritarian rule. In the North, Kim Il Sung remained in power for more than 40 years after the start of the Korean War, making him one of the most durable rulers of the 20th century. Only with the onset of democratic change in the Soviet Union, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, and the waning of the cold war at the start of the

a u.s. army sergeant and a republic of korea army sergeant, members of the united nations joint security force, stand watch at one of the several security checkpoints near the border of the “no-man’s-land” between south and north korea. outposts such as these have been maintained by both sides since the signing of the armistice in July 1953. (Defense Imagery)

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1990s did the winds of change begin to be felt in North Korea. Talk of peaceful reunification between North and South Korea was heard both in Seoul and in Pyongyang. North Korea made a small but significant gesture of diplomatic reconciliation to the United States in 1991, returning the remains of 11 U.S. servicemen, among the more than 8,000 Americans still missing from the Korean War. In the years after the Korean War, memories of the conflict faded in the United States. It has been called “America’s forgotten war” and the “unknown war.” It ended in an inconclusive stalemate, and there were no great victory celebrations to mark the return of the troops from the fighting. Yet for a war so quickly forgotten once it was over, the Korean War had a major impact on the United States. It was the decisive moment in the United States’s emergence as a world power, one prepared to intervene militarily around the globe in defense of its perceived interests. The U.S. military establishment, cut to the bone in the aftermath of World War II, would from now on be lavishly funded by Congress. President Eisenhower, who tried to rein in defense spending during his own years in the White House, would warn in his farewell address to the nation in 1960 of the power now wielded by the “military-industrial complex” in U.S. politics. At the same time, the war revealed how a president who chose to could exert broad undefined power. Eisenhower himself had no hesitation in making use of the newly expanded power of the president to shift U.S. troops around the globe without consulting Congress, as he did in 1958 when he sent the marines into Lebanon to prevent a Syrian takeover. U.S.-Soviet relations began to thaw in the aftermath of the Korean War. Although there were tense confrontations during the next decade over questions such as the status of Berlin and the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, the danger of another world war seemed to lessen. The focus of U.S.-Soviet confrontation shifted during the Korean War from Europe to what was beginning to be called the “Third World,” the formerly colonized and “underdeveloped” countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The lessons of the Korean War for U.S. political and military leaders were ambiguous. On the one hand, the war seemed to prove that, through a determined use of U.S. power, communist takeovers of small Third World countries could be prevented. On the other hand, the sobering memory of the Chinese Communist onslaught

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in the winter of 1950 was a strong argument against getting involved in future ground wars on the Asian continent. In the years after the Vietnam War, U.S. presidents would complain that their hands were tied in foreign policy by a “Vietnam syndrome,” a fear of the possibly disastrous consequences of U.S. military involvement. But before there was a Vietnam syndrome there was a Korea syndrome. Assistant Secretary of Defense John MacNaughton sent a memo, entitled “Plan for Action for South Vietnam,” in March 1965 to Secretary of Defense

the two KoreAS A hAlf-century After the KoreAn wAr The cold war divided the world into hostile camps. it also divided three nations—germany, Vietnam, and korea—into hostile sections aligned with one or the other of the cold war superpowers. eventually two of the three divided nations were reunited—Vietnam in 1975 under communist leadership, germany in 1990 under noncommunist leadership. how long will it be until the two koreas become one again? in 2001, south korea had a population of 48 million people, compared to north korea’s 22 million. south korea is one of the most prosperous nations in asia, with a strong modern industrial base allowing it to be a major exporter of steel, automobiles, and other manufactured goods. its annual gross domestic product in 2001 stood at about 765 billion dollars. north korea, in contrast, is one of the poorest nations in asia and the world. after years of economic mismanagement, its industrial base is near collapse, and without international humanitarian aid, north korea would be unable to keep its population from starvation. in 2001 its estimated annual gross domestic product stood at just 22 billion dollars. under the leadership of kim Jong il, who succeeded his father, kim il sung, as head of the north korean government in 1994, north korea has made some effort to reach out from its status as international pariah. in June 2000, kim Jong il and south korea’s president kim dae Jung met in the first ever south-north summit meeting. steps toward reconciliation were set back the following year, as u.s. attitudes toward north korea hardened in the aftermath of the 2001 world Trade center attack. u.s. president george w. Bush denounced the country as part of an “axis of evil” that included iran and iraq. The future of the two koreas remains an open question.

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a little korean girl places a wreath of flowers on the grave of a u.s. soldier, while Pfc. chester Painter and cpl. harry May present arms, at the un cemetery in Pusan. (National Archives)

Robert McNamara, declaring that “Large U.S. troop deployments [in Vietnam] . . . are blocked by ‘French-defeat’ and ‘Korea’ syndromes.” To counter this “Korea syndrome,” John F. Kennedy had encouraged the U.S. military to develop counterinsurgency tactics to come to the aid of embattled anticommunist nations. Instead of sending in large numbers of U.S. troops, U.S. advisers such as the army’s Green Berets would train the soldiers of friendly governments to defend themselves against Communist-led guerrilla uprisings. Among the architects of this new strategy was Gen. Maxwell Taylor, the last commander to lead the Eighth Army during the Korean War. When counterinsurgency failed to turn back the Communists in Vietnam, the U.S. military reverted to the conventional warfare tactics it had employed in Korea. Units bloodied in Korea, such as the 1st Cavalry (now retrained and equipped as helicopter-borne “Air Cavalry”) and the 1st Marines, were deployed in Vietnam in the summer of 1965. They were under the command of Gen. William C. Westmoreland, who had served in Korea as commander of the 187th Airborne Infantry Regimental Combat Team. With his “search and destroy” tactics, Westmoreland tried to repeat the successful formula used by

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the Eighth Army in turning back the Chinese offensives in the spring of 1951: When the enemy was out in the open, pour on U.S. firepower. But in Vietnam, despite the awesome technological edge possessed by the United States, the advantages lay with the Communists. Unlike the barren Korean hills, in Vietnam triple-canopy jungle and heavy forests sheltered enemy movements. In South Korea, the civilian population had for the most part opposed the North Korean invasion. In South Vietnam, the Communists succeeded in tapping deeply held nationalist sentiments. Guerrilla stealth, mobility, and popular support could not be countered by helicopter gunships and B-52 strikes. The real lesson of the Korean War was one of understanding the necessity for prudent limits in the commitment of U.S. military power abroad. In the summer of 1950 the U.S. military was used effectively, even brilliantly as at Inchon, in rolling back an open act of aggression by a foreign invader using conventional tactics. Tempted by the pros-

Long regarded as troops in “the forgotten war,” veterans of the korean war were finally honored by their own memorial at a corner of the Mall in washington, d.c. The memorial consists of 19 slightly larger-than-life u.s. soldiers marching forward as if on a patrol. The stainless-steel sculptures represent members of the four major military branches and a cross section of the ethnic groups who belonged to the military. (U.S. Navy)

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pects of a glorious march to the Yalu in the fall of 1950, military leaders squandered the victory they had already won. The great military hero of the Korean War was not the vainglorious MacArthur, but the shrewd and careful Gen. Matthew Ridgway. It was Ridgway who, in the words of Korean War veteran and historian Roy Appleman, “redeemed the military honor of the United States in the eyes of the world” when he took over command of the Eighth Army in the dark winter of 1950–51. And it was Ridgway who would warn prophetically, in the spring of 1954, against U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, saying that it would take a half-million men to intervene effectively, and even then the results would be uncertain. At dawn on July 5, 1950, 1st Lt. William Wyrick was a platoon leader with Task Force Smith, facing the onslaught of North Korean tanks on the highway near Osan. His platoon sergeant, he later recalled, got on the field telephone and called back to unit headquarters for supporting fire from 60-mm mortars. “They won’t reach that far,” the sergeant was told. “Well, how about the 81-mm mortars?” “They didn’t come over with us.” “How about the 4.2s [mortars]?” “The 4.2s can’t fire.” “How about the artillery?” “No communications.” “What about the Air Force?” “They don’t know where we are.” “Call the Navy.” “They can’t reach this far.” “Well, then,” the sergeant shouted in understandable exasperation, “send me a camera. I want to take a picture of this.” It was a moment worth a photograph, in a war worth remembering.

Glossary aggression Hostile action or assault initiated by one country against another. airborne People or material delivered by transport planes, helicopters, or other aircraft. An “airborne” unit is specially trained to land with parachutes and will usually do so. ammunition The materials used in discharging firearms or any weapon that throws projectiles, including powder, shot, shrapnel, bullets, cartridges, and the means of igniting and exploding them, such as primers and fuses. Chemicals, bombs, grenades, mines, and missiles may also be regarded as ammunition. amphibious warfare The delivery of armed forces from shipboard to a hostile shoreline. appeasement The act of acceding to the belligerent demands of a group or country, usually involving a sacrifice of principle or justice. armistice A truce or agreement by warring parties to cease hostilities, at least temporarily but usually with the intention of negotiating a permanent peace. The best known armistice of modern times is the one signed by the Allies and Central Powers that brought World War I to an end at 11 a.m. on November 11, 1918. atrocity In wartime, an extreme and criminal act carried out by civilians or members of a military unit such as the murder of unarmed civilians. attrition The wearing down of enemy resources and ability to continue armed conflict, as when military attacks are launched not primarily to take ground but to kill as many of enemy troops as possible. bazooka A cylindrical rocket launcher carried by infantry in World War II. It fired a projectile intended to penetrate the armor plating of a tank or other military vehicle. Its name was based on its supposed resemblance to a crude musical instrument used by an American comedian of that time, Bob Burns. 144

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beachhead The area that is the first objective of a military force landing on an enemy shore. brainwashing A prolonged psychological process designed to erase an individual’s past beliefs and concepts and to substitute new ones. casualties Losses of military personnel to enemy action, as killed, wounded, captured, or missing in action. cease-fire A suspension of active hostilities between warring parties. civil war A war between parties, regions, or ethnic groups within a single country. coalition A combination or alliance arranged on a temporary basis, as among wartime allies. collective security A policy or principle in international affairs, according to which many countries band together to guarantee the security of individual countries against foreign aggression. colonialism A system under which one people or territory are ruled from afar by another country. communism The theory and system of social organization that is based on common or state ownership of industry, agriculture, and all other economic enterprises; a system of government based upon the dictatorship of the Communist Party. convoy A group of ships or land vehicles traveling together for mutual protection, sometimes under armed escort. counterinsurgency The strategy designed to suppress uprisings or insurgencies before they become full-scale wars, it emphasizes mobility and surprise by small units of highly trained specialists. This became the guiding doctrine of U.S. military and political involvement in South Vietnam in the early 1960s. covert Undercover or secret; usually used in reference to military actions that involve special operations forces. draft A form of involuntary military recruitment through the selection of individuals from the civilian population to join a nation’s armed forces. Also known as “conscription.” exile Enforced or voluntary removal from one’s native country. friendly fire Combat deaths or wounds caused by the guns, bombs, or artillery of one’s own side in a war. garrison A permanent military post, or the troops assigned to such a post. guerrilla warfare A strategy of warfare in which small bands of civilians or nonuniformed soldiers harass a larger and better-armed enemy

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through surprise raids or attacks on supply and communication lines, usually depending on the sympathy of local civilians for information and shelter. howitzer An artillery piece that delivers shells against a target via a high trajectory. infiltration A method of attack in which small units of troops penetrate enemy lines through weak or unguarded points. inflation An uncontrollable rise in the amount of currency circulating in an economy, resulting in an undesirable rise in prices for goods and services. isolationism A policy of nonparticipation in international affairs. junk A flat-bottom sailing ship with a high stern, primarily a cargo ship. Originally Chinese, it came to be used throughout East and Southeast Asia, where the Europeans who first encountered it adapted its Javanese name, djong. logistics The branch of military science concerned with the transportation and supply of troops in the field. machine gun A weapon able to deliver a rapid and continuous fire of bullets until the weapon’s magazine or firing belt is depleted. MASH (mobile army surgical hospital) Field hospitals set up close to frontline military units, to provide immediate surgical care to severely wounded soldiers. MIA (missing in action) Military personnel who are unaccounted for after a combat engagement, who may have been killed, captured, or are simply lost, but whose fate remains unknown. mine A device containing an explosive charge, buried or placed in a camouflaged setting and designed to explode and kill enemy soldiers or destroy enemy vehicles when they are in its immediate vicinity. missionaries Religious believers, sometimes but not always members of the clergy, who travel to distant lands to convert others to their religion. M-1 rifle A semiautomatic rifle with an eight-round clip, the M-1 was the standard U.S. infantry rifle in both World War II and the Korean War. mortar A small, portable artillery piece that throws shells at high angles onto its target. napalm A jellied gasoline incendiary weapon. Dropped from aircraft in canisters or fired from flame-throwers, it burns with fierce heat. nationalism Devotion to the interests of one’s own nation, including the desire for national independence.

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neutrality The status of a nation that does not participate in a war between other nations. occupation The invasion, conquest, and control of a nation or territory by a hostile military force. pacifist An opponent of all wars on the principle of opposition to killing. perimeter The boundary enclosing a designated area. POW (prisoner of war) Military personnel captured and held by the enemy. propaganda News and commentary on news released by a government in wartime, intended to persuade domestic and foreign audiences of the righteousness of the government’s cause in the war. quartermaster A military officer charged with providing shelter, clothing, provisions, fuel, and other materials to troops in the field. rear echelon That part of a military force in the field that does not serve in combat in the front lines but rather provides command structure, services, and material to the soldiers at the front. recoilless rifle An infantry antitank weapon, developed in the closing days of World War II and employed in the early days of the Korean War. It proved relatively useless in combat against tanks but continued to be used as an antipersonnel weapon. reconnaissance A search made for useful military information in the field by means of observation of enemy positions and movements and the physical landscape upon which battles are likely to occur. reprisal The infliction of injury on an enemy in warfare in retaliation for an injury suffered at the enemy’s hands. rocket launcher The 3.5-inch rocket launcher, introduced as a U.S. antitank weapon during the Korean War, proved a distinct improvement over the World War II bazookas with which U.S. troops first tried, ineffectively, to halt North Korean tanks. sortie The flight of an aircraft on a single combat mission. strafe To attack ground troops or installations from the air with machine-gun fire. supply depot A place where a large quantity of military materials, including ammunition, fuel, or food, is gathered prior to distribution to soldiers in the field.

Further Reading nonFICTIon

Alexander, Bevan. Korea: The First War We Lost. New York: Hippocrene, 1986. Appleman, Roy. Disaster in Korea: The Chinese Confront MacArthur. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1989. ———. East of Chosin: Entrapment and Breakout in Korea. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987. ———. Escaping the Trap: The U.S. Army in Northeast Korea, 1950. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987. ———. Ridgway Duels for Korea. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1990. Blair, Clay. The Forgotten War: America in Korea, 1950–1953. New York: Times Books, 1987. Breuer, William B. Shadow Warriors: The Covert War in Korea. New York: John Wiley, 1996. Bussey, Charles M. Firefight at Yechon: Courage and Racism in the Korean War. New York: Macmillan, 1991. Carew, Tim. Korea: The Commonwealth at War. London: Cassell, 1967. Casey, Steven. Selling the Korean War: Propaganda, Politics, and Public Opinion in the United States, 1950–1953. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Cotton, James, and Ian Neary. The Korean War as History. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1989. Cumings, Bruce. Child of Conflict: The Korean-American Relationship, 1943–1953. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1983. ———. Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. ———. The Origins of the Korean War. Vol. 1, Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945–1974. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981. ———. The Origins of the Korean War. Vol. 2, The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947–1950. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. Dae-Sook, Suh. Kim Il Sung: The North Korean Leader. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Deane, Philip. I Was a Captive in Korea. New York: W. W. Norton, 1953. Dobbs, Charles M. The Unwanted Symbol: American Foreign Policy, the Cold War, and Korea, 1945–1950. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1981. Drury, Robert, and Tom Clavin. The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2009.

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Further reading

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Duncan, David Douglas. This Is War. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1951. Evanhoe, Ed. Darkmoon: Eighth Army Special Operations in the Korean War. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1995. Farrar-Hockley, Sir Anthony. The British Part in the Korean War. Vol. 1, A Distant Obligation. London: HMSO, 1990. ———. The British Part in the Korean War. Vol. 2, An Honourable Discharge. London: HMSO, 1994. Fehrenbach, T. R. This Kind of War: A Study of Unpreparedness. New York: Macmillan, 1963. Foot, Rosemary. A Substitute for Victory: The Politics of Peacemaking at the Korean Armistice Talks. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990. ———. The Wrong War: American Policy and the Dimensions of the Korean Conflict. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985. Goncharov, Sergei N., John W. Lewis, and xue Litai. Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao and the Korean War. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993. Goulden, Joseph. Korea: The Untold Story. New York: Times Books, 1982. Grey, Jeffrey. The Commonwealth Armies and the Korean War. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1988. Halberstam, David. The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War. New York: Hyperion, 2007. Halliday, Jon, and Bruce Cumings. The Unknown War: Korea. New York: Pantheon, 1988. Hastings, Max. The Korean War. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Heinl, Robert D. Victory at High Tide: The Inchon-Seoul Campaign. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1968. James, D. Clayton. The Years of MacArthur: Triumph and Disaster, 1945–1964. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985. Jian, Chen. China’s Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Kaufman, Burton I. The Korean War: Challenges in Crisis, Credibility, and Command. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986. Knox, Donald. The Korean War: An Oral History. Vol. 1, Pusan to Chosin. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1985. ———. The Korean War: An Oral History. Vol. 2, Uncertain Victory. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1988. Leckie, Robert. Conflict: The History of the Korean War. New York: Putnam, 1962. MacDonald, Callum A. Korea: The War before Vietnam. New York: Free Press, 1986. Malcolm, Ben S. White Tigers: My Secret War in North Korea. Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1996. Marshall, S. L. A. Pork Chop Hill. New York: Morrow, 1956. McCullough, David. Truman. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992. Merrill, James. Korea: The Peninsular Origins of the War. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989. Rees, David. Korea: The Limited War. London: Macmillan, 1964. Ridgway, Matthew B. The Korean War. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967.

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Shugang, Zhang. Mao’s Military Romanticism: China and the Korean War, 1950–1953. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995. Spanier, John W. The Truman-MacArthur Controversy and the Korean War. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1959. Stanton, Shelby. America’s Tenth Legion: X Corps in Korea, 1950. Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1989. Stone, I. F. The Hidden History of the Korean War, 1950–1951. Boston: Little, Brown, 1952. Stueck, William J. The Korean War: An International History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995. ———. Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. Summers, Harry G. Korean War Almanac. New York: Facts On File, 1990. Toland, John. In Mortal Combat: Korea, 1950–1953. New York: Morrow, 1991. Van Ree, Eric. Socialism in One Zone: Stalin’s Policy in Korea, 1945–1947. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Wells, Anne Sharp. Refighting the Last War: Command and Crises in Korea, 1950– 1953. New York: Free Press, 1993. Wood, Herbert Fairlie. Strange Battleground: The Official History of the Canadian Army in Korea. Ottawa, Ont.: Queen’s Printer, 1966.

FICTIon

Ahn Jung-hyo. Silver Stallion: A Novel of Korea. New York: Soho Press, 1990. Brady, James. The Marines of Autumn: A Novel about the Korean War. New York: St. Martin’s, 2001. Hooker, Richard D. MASH. New York: William Morrow, 1997. Michener, James. The Bridges at Toko-Ri. New York: Random House, 1953. Morris, Willie. Taps: A Novel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Salter, James. The Hunters. New York: Vintage Books, 1999. Simmons, Edwin Howard. Dog Company Six. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2000.

WeB SITeS

The Korean War, June 1950–July 1953. URL: http://www.defenselink.mil/specials/ koreanwar/. The Korean War: Overview. URL: http://www.korean-war.com.

Index Page numbers in italic indicate illustrations or photographs. Page numbers followed by m indicate maps. Page numbers followed by g indicate glossary entries. Page numbers in boldface indicate box features.

ammunition 144g amphibious landings 55, 56, 64, 125, 126–127 amphibious military vehicles 125 amphibious warfare (term) 144g antiaircraft guns 46 antitank guns 123, 134 appeasement 63, 144g armistice 119, 121, 144g armistice talks. See peace negotiations armor-piercing shells 123 Army-McCarthy hearings 103 atomic bombs. See nuclear weapons atrocities Communist charges against U.S. 106 defined 144g No Gun Ri controversy 44 against POWs 111 attrition 144g Augustine of Hippo, Saint 32 automobile industry 101, 101 “axis of evil” 140

a aces 109, 133 Acheson, Dean and beginning of Korean War 27–28 and exclusion of Korea from defense perimeter 124 and MacArthur’s “posterity papers” 96 and MacArthur’s threats of war with China 98 National Press Club speech 28 aerial combat 109–110, 132–133 African-Americans in U.S. military 42–43, 43. See also 24th Infantry Regiment, 25th Division aftermath of war 136–143 aggression 144g airborne unit 144g Air Force, U.S. (USAF) 76, 109 air operations in 1951 108–109 in early 1953 119 MacArthur’s initial orders for 1 in Operation Killer 129–130 as tactical element of war 123 Allen, Norman 72 Almond, Edward M. 56 Chosin Reservoir 77 Inchon campaign 56 liberation of Seoul 60 North Korean invasion 64 Pusan Perimeter breakout 61 and Ridgway’s assumption of Eighth Army command 127

B B-29 Superfortress 110 background to war 14–26, 16, 17, 18m ballistic missiles xiv Barber, William E. ix–x baseball 100–101 bazookas defined 144g at Obong-ni 51 against T-34 tanks 123 at Taejon 40 and Task Force Smith 7 beachhead 145g Beijing Radio 106 Bloody Ridge 50–51, 53, 108, 130 Blue Beach 58–59 bombing raids 110

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“Bowling Alley” 52 Bradley, Omar N. 9 brainwashing 113–114, 115–116, 145g Britt, Thomas 80 Browning machine guns 134 “bug-out fever” 83 bunkers 129, 132 Bush, George W. 140

C Cafferata, Hector x Canada 54 Capitol Division 117 Cardinal, James 70, 83 casualties among POWs 116 Chinese (spring 1951) 92 Chinese (total) ix, 136 Chosin Reservoir 81 civilian (total) 136 defined 145g 1st Cavalry 108 Hadong 44 Korean (total) ix Kum River battle 38 North Korean (total) 136 during peace talks 122 pre–Korean War conflicts (1946– 1950) 25 ROK (first week of war) 1 ROK (total) 136 Sangju 43 Taejon 41 Task Force Smith 8 U.S. (as of July 29th, 1950) 45 U.S. (during peace talks) 122 U.S. (in last two years of war) 121 U.S. (total) ix, 136 USAF 76 war correspondents 137 cavalry 123 Cayuga, HMCS 54 cease-fire (term) 145g cease-fire negotiations. See peace negotiations cemeteries 82, 141 Chang Chun San 121 Changjun River 79 checkpoints 138 chemical warfare 106 Chiang Kai-shek and 1949 Chinese Revolution 12

and MacArthur’s North Korean plans 66 and Taiwan 67 China (pre-Communist era) Japanese battles during WWII 19–20 Korean history 15 Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) 16–17 China, People’s Republic of (PRC) changes in 1990s xiii effect of Korean War on international standing xii invasion of South Korea xi, xii, 24, 83–92, 85m MacArthur’s blockade proposal 127 MacArthur’s North Korean plans 66 MacArthur’s threats of war with 98 peace negotiations 104 responsibility for war 136–137 and Taiwan 67 and U.S./UN North Korean invasion 67–68 China, Republic of. See Taiwan Chinese Communist Forces (CCF) arrival in North Korea 68–69 casualties ix, 136 Chipyong-ni 89 Chosin Reservoir 77 first attack on U.S. troops 72 first clash with UN forces 70 Funchilin Pass 79–80 “human sea” 126 Kansas Line 105 Korean independence movement 19 Kumsong raid 119 logistics problems 128 Operation Killer 129 and POWs 112–114, 115–116, 116 second phase of North Korean offensive 74 South Korean invasion 83–84 spring 1951 offensive 91–92 Third Phase Offensive 86 Chinese Revolution (1949) 12 Chipyong-ni, South Korea 89 Chi-tzu (Chinese prince) 15 Chosin Reservoir 65, 72, 81 Chosin Reservoir, Battle of the ix–x, 77–78, 80 Christian Youth movement 18 civil war 145g Clark, Eugene 126, 127 Clark, Mark 108

Index Clifford, Clark 23 Clinton, Bill x–xi, xii coalition 145g Cohen, Arthur 74 cold war containment doctrine 10–11 and divided nations 140 end of xi, xiii, xiv, 138–139 and occupation zones 22 position of Korean War in xii Soviet-U.S. relations after Korea 139 U.S. foreign policy at beginning of Korean War 9 collective security 145g college deferments 100 colonialism 145g Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training 42 Communism Asian advances after WWII 12 defined 145g demise of xi, xiii, 138–139 and Korean independence movement 19 and McCarthyism 95 Company D, 89th Tank Battalion 107 Company F, 2nd Battalion, Seventh U.S. Marines ix–x Congress, MacArthur’s address to 99 containment doctrine 9–11, 30 convoy 10, 145g correspondents. See journalists/journalism Corsairs 51, 130 counterinsurgency 141, 145g covert 145g Craig, Edward 51 Cuba 139

D Daily, Edward Lee 44 Daniel, John C. 118 Davidson, Fred 58 Day, Philip, Jr. 6–9 Dean, William F. and 24th Infantry Division 35 and Medal of Honor 40–41 and North Korean advance on Seoul 37–39 and Pyongtaek 36 and Taejon 39–41 Deane, Philip 111–112 death marches 115

153

defense budget, U.S. 13, 139 deferments 100 Democratic Party election of 1950 95–96 election of 1952 117, 138 Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) 23. See also North Korea dictatorships, South Korea v. North Korea 137 Distinguished Service Cross (Ellison Wynn) 75 Dodd, Francis T. 114 dogfights 132 draft 93, 145g Dulles, John Foster 28, 118 Duncan, David Douglas 102, 137

e economy, U.S. 100–102 See It Now (TV program) 103 8th Cavalry, U.S. 72 Eighth U.S. Army, Korea (EUSAK) arrival in Korea 34 human wave assaults against 74–76 and Kansas Line 104–105 and North Korean invasion 64, 65, 74 and Operation Piledriver 106–107 and Pusan Perimeter 45, 47, 60–61 retreat from North Korea 76, 83 Ridgway’s assumption of command 86, 88, 128 tactics as model for Vietnam War 142 and Taejon 41 Maxwell Taylor’s assumption of command 108 and Third Phase Offensive 86 Van Fleet’s assumption of command 130–131 eight-inch howitzers 7 8225th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital 89 Eisenhower, Dwight David 117, 117–118, 139 election of 1948 (Korea) 23 election of 1950 (U.S.) 95–96 election of 1952 (U.S.) 95, 116–118, 138 electric power capacity 110 entrenchments 52, 92 executive power 139 exiles 18–19, 145g

F F-80 Shooting Star 132

154

Korean War

F-86 Sabrejets 73, 76, 132, 133 Faith, Don C. 77 Far East Air Force 76 field artillery 7 field hospitals 128 5th Cavalry, U.S. 72, 89 Fifth Air Force 76 51st Fighter Interceptor Wing 73 “fighting bunkers” 132 1st Battalion, 2nd Regiment, South Korea 129 1st Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment, 24th Infantry Division. See Task Force Smith 1st Battalion, 29th Infantry Regiment 44 1st Cavalry Division arrival in Korea 41 Chinese attacks in North Korea 75 Inchon campaign plans 55 Naktong Bulge 53 Naktong River 52 No Gun Ri controversy 44 return to Japan 108 Sangnyong 108 Vietnam 141 Yongdong 42 1st Marine Division, U.S. cemetery 82 Chosin Reservoir 77–78 Inchon 56–57 Punchbowl 107 Vietnam 141 1st Marine Division Reconnaissance Company 90 1st Provisional Marine Brigade arrival in Korea 47 Inchon campaign 56–57 Naktong Bulge 50 flanking maneuvers 37 Ford automobile assembly line 101 foreign aid 11, 28–29 foreign policy, U.S. at beginning of Korean War 9 Korean War’s effect on 139–143 Republican opposition to Truman’s initiatives 95 and responsibility for war 137–138 “forgotten war” ix, 139 45-mm antitank guns 134 4th Division, North Korea 49, 51 Freeman, Paul 89 French battalions 89 friendly fire 59, 145g Funchilin Pass 79–80

G Gaddis, John Lewis xii, 21 Gallup poll 99 Garand rifles. See M-1 rifles garrisons 3–4, 145g Geneva conventions 111 Germany 140 germ warfare 106, 113 Gloucester Hill, Battle of 91 Goncharov, Sergei xi Grand Alliance 9–10 Great Britain 99 Greece 11 Green Berets 141 ground-to-ground rockets 75 guerrilla warfare 19, 145g–146g

H H-5 helicopter (Sikorsky) 41 Hadong, South Korea 44 Hagaru, North Korea 65, 78, 78–79 hand grenades 135 Han River 33–34, 91 Harriman, Averell 66 Harrison, William K. 119 Heartbreak Ridge 108, 130, 130 helicopters 41, 90, 90, 102, 128, 128 Higgins, Marguerite 36, 37, 137 Hiroshima 20 Hiss, Alger 97 Ho Chi Minh 12 Hodge, John R. 22–23 home front 92–103, 101. See also United States after Chosin Reservoir battle 81–82 automobile industry 101, 101 baseball 100–101 Communist attempts to undermine war support 106 economy 100–102 election of 1950 95–96 election of 1952 95, 116–118, 138 during latter part of war 92–103 McCarthyism 94–96, 97 television 102–103, 137 and U.S. North Korean invasion plans 63 horses 123 howitzers 7, 7, 123, 146g “human sea” 126 human wave assaults 49–50, 74–75 Hungnam, North Korea 79–81, 82

Index Husch flare 132–133 Hwanggan, South Korea 45 Hyesanjin, North Korea 74

I Imjin River 91, 104 Inchon, Korea 22, 47, 86, 89 Inchon campaign (September 15-30, 1950) 54–62, 56, 57m, 59, 60, 126–127 Independence Movement Day 18 Indochina 31 infantrymen 36 infiltration 146g inflation 146g Iron Triangle 91, 92, 107 isolationism 12, 146g Ix Corps 129

J Jabara, James 109 Japan departure from Korea 22 as forward base for U.S. war effort 11 and Inchon campaign 58 and Korean history 16–18 and Task Force Smith 4 U.S. troops in 3–4 and World War II 19–20 Japanese Empire (1931-1941) 18m jet fighter planes 76, 109–110, 132–133, 133. See also specific planes, e.g.: F-86 Sabrejets Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) authorization of ground forces 2 Inchon campaign debates 55–56 MacArthur and 70, 73, 96 North Korean invasion plans 63 Ridgway and 86 and Truman’s firing of MacArthur 100 journalists/journalism 37, 102–103, 137 Joy, C. Turner 104 junks (ship) 127, 146g “just war” 32–33

K Kaesong, South Korea 103, 104 Kansas Line 104–107 Kari San Mountain 102 Ke In-Ju 127 Kennan, George 10–11 Kennedy, John F. 141 KGB 97

155

Kim Dae Jung x, 140 Kim Il Sung 28 at beginning of war 27 creation of Soviet-style government 22 death of xiii early years 19 at end of war 136 length of dictatorship xii–xiii and North Korean military buildup 25 postwar rule of North Korea 138 and responsibility for war xi–xii, 136 and Soviet equipping of North Korean Army 124 and Stalin xi, 24 Kim Jong Il xiii, 140 Koch, Doug 49 Koguryo 15 Koje-do Island 114 Korea 120m contemporary status, North/South 140 history prior to war 14–26 skirmishes in years after WWII 25–26 Korean Military Advisory Group (KMAG) 30 Korean Peninsula 2m, 14–15 Korean Provisional Government 18–19 Korean War (map) 120m The Korean War: An International History (Stueck) xii Korean War Veterans Memorial (Washington, D. C.) x–xi Korea syndrome 140–141 Korgie, Leonard 41 Kumhwa, South Korea 134–135 Kum River 37–38, 86 Kumsong, South Korea 119

L lessons of war 136–143 Lewis, John W. xi Life magazine 102, 137 limited war 9, 13, 82 Lin Biao 69 Listening Post Alice. See Sandbag Castle Litai, xue xi logistics 128, 146g “long telegram” 10 Lopez, Baldomero “Punchy” 59 Lovless, Jay B. 36

156

Korean War M

M-1 rifles 35–36, 36, 125, 146g M-3 sniperscope 125 M-5 antitank gun 123 M-26 Pershing tanks 53 M-46 Patton tanks 105 MacArthur, Douglas A. 4, 43, 56, 69, 88, 100 air power, overreliance on 123 appointment as UN commander 1, 31 and beginning of Korean War 28 cable requesting U.S. troops 3 and CCF clashes with UN forces 70–71 and Chinese offensive in North Korea 74–76 differences with Truman over North Korean campaign 66–67 and escalation of war 81–82 and Inchon campaign 47, 54–56, 58–60 inspection tour of South Korea 2, 34 invasion of North Korea 63–67 and Japan 11 liberation of Seoul 60 and North Korean advance on Seoul 37 and Operation Killer 129 “posterity papers” 96–98 removal from command 83, 96–100, 130 request for reinforcements 126–127 responsibility for course of Korean War 137–138 retreat from North Korea 126 return to Korea (February 1951) 90–91 return to U.S. 99 Matthew Ridgway and 86 and Soviet Union’s involvement in China 20 and Task Force Smith deployment 4 Wake Island meeting with Truman 69–70 Yalu River bridge bombings 73 machine guns 146g MacNaughton, John 140–141 magazines 102 Malik, Jacob 103 Manchuria Chinese troops from 126 and earliest Koreans 15 Kim Il Sung and 19

and Korean Independence Movement 19 and nuclear weapons during Korean War 21 Mao Zedong 68 and 1949 Chinese Revolution 12 and Kim Il Sung’s invasion plans xii, 24 and North Korean invasion of South xi and responsibility for war xi and Taiwan 67 and U.S./UN North Korean invasion 67–68 Marine Helicopter Transport Squadron 161 90 Marines, U.S. 48, 59, 75, 78, 80 Chosin Reservoir ix–x Hungnam 80–81 Inchon campaign 55 Kari San Mountain 102 Seoul 61 Marshall Plan 11 Martin, Joseph W. 98 Martin, Paul 74 Martin, Robert 36 Martinez, Benito 131 MASH (mobile army surgical hospital) 88, 89, 90, 146g M*A*S*H (movie) 92 M*A*S*H (TV series) 90 massacres 44 May, Harry 141 McCaffrey, William 128 McCarthy, Joseph 94–96, 95, 97, 103 McCarthyism 94–96, 97 McLean, Thomas 131 McNamara, Robert 141 Medal of Honor William E. Barber x William F. Dean 40–41 Don C. Faith 77 Baldomero “Punchy” Lopez 59 Benito Martinez 131 media 137. See also journalists/journalism medics 40, 107 MIA (missing in action) 139, 146g Michaelis, John “Iron Mike” 45 Michaud, Doug 78 MiG-15 fighter planes 72, 72, 109, 132, 133 military-industrial complex 139 mines 132–133, 146g

Index missionaries 19, 146g Missouri, USS 34 Mitchell, Bill 123 Moisin-Nagant rifle 125 Mongolia 15 Mongols 15–16 Monocacy, USS 16 mortars 30 defined 146g and Sandbag Castle 131 and Soviet equipping of North Korean Army 124 mountains 122 Mount McKinley, USS 56, 58 Murray, James, Jr. 121 Murrow, Edward R. 103

n Nagasaki 20 Naktong Bulge 49–51, 53 Naktong River 45, 47 Nam Il 119 napalm 77, 133, 146g National Assembly (South Korea) 25 nationalism 146g Nationalist China. See Taiwan Nationalist Chinese 66 neutrality 147g newsreels 137 19th Infantry Regiment 38 90-mm antiaircraft guns 46 No Gun Ri controversy 44 no-man’s land 138 Nootka, HMCS 54 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 11, 94 North Korea as absolute dictatorship xii–xiii after 1950s xiii contemporary status of xiv, 140 diplomatic reconciliation efforts with U.S. 139 invasion of South Korea 1, 5m, 27–46 and POWs 115 and South Korean government 24–25 UN invasion of 61–70, 71m UN retreat 70–80, 83 North Korean People’s Army (NKPA) casualties (as of July 29th, 1950) 46 casualties (total) 136 invasion of South Korea 1, 5m, 27–46 and Kansas Line 105

157

at Naktong Bulge 53 and POWs 111–112, 116 and Pusan Perimeter 49 and ROK North Korean invasion 64 and Sandbag Castle 131 at Seoul 32–33 weapons superiority in early years of war 123 Northwest Pacific (1950) 2m NSC-68 13, 30 nuclear weapons Eisenhower’s and Dulles’s “saber rattling” 118 and exclusion of Korea from defense perimeter 124 first Soviet test 12 Soviet-U.S. balance during war 21 U.S. development during WWII 20 U.S. monopoly after WWII 12

o Obong-ni 50–51 occupation (term) 147g occupation governments 20–22 187th Regimental Combat Team 96 120-mm mortars 124 Operation Chromite. See Inchon campaign Operation Killer 91, 129–130 Operation Little Switch 119 Operation Piledriver 106–107 Operation Ripper 91 Operation Rugged 91

P pacifists 147g Painter, Chester 141 Panmunjom, Korea 14 Panmunjom peace talks. See peace negotiations paratroopers 96 Payne, Charles 49–50 peace negotiations 121 and 38th parallel 14 casualties during 122 combat objectives during 105 first meetings 103, 104 and MacArthur’s threats of war with China 98 and May 1952 air offensive 110 POW issues 111–116 Rhee’s sabotaging of 119 Peng Dehuai 69

158

Korean War

People’s Daily (China) 103 People’s Liberation Army (China). See Chinese Communist Forces (CCF) perimeter (term) 147g. See also Pusan Perimeter Piledriver. See Operation Piledriver “Plan for Action in South Vietnam” memo 140–141 Pohang-dong, South Korea 52, 53 “police action” 31 Pork Chop Hill 108 “posterity papers” 96–98 POWs (prisoners of war) Chinese 114 William F. Dean 40 defined 147g North Korean 112, 114 peace negotiations 111–116 prisoner exchanges 118 repatriation issues 116 Rhee’s freeing of 119 UN troops 113, 115, 115–116 USAF airmen 76 U.S. troops 115–116 presidential power 139 Princeton University 18 prisoner exchanges 118, 119 propaganda 106, 134, 147g psychological warfare 106 PTRD antitank rifles 134 public opinion polls dwindling support for war 93 and Truman’s decision not to run for reelection 116–117 and Truman’s firing of MacArthur 99 Punchbowl 107–108, 130 Pusan, South Korea 45, 48, 141 Pusan Perimeter 45–55, 124–125 Pyongtaek, South Korea 35, 36 Pyongyang, North Korea establishment of 15 and May 1952 air offensive 110 and North Korean invasion 64, 65 UN capture of 70 UN evacuation from 76

Q quartermaster 147g

r Randolph, A. Philip 42 rear echelons 147g

recoilless rifles 7, 147g reconnaissance 147g Red Army (Soviet) 19, 20, 22, 116 Red Beach 58 “reeducation” 113 refugees 38, 44, 80, 81 repatriation of POWs 116, 119 reporters. See journalists/journalism reprisal 147g Republican Party and Acheson’s National Press Club speech 28–29 and dwindling public support for war 93–94 and election of 1950 95–96 and election of 1952 116–118 and MacArthur’s “posterity papers” 97 and Truman’s war initiatives 30, 31, 94–95 Republic of Korea (ROK) 23. See also South Korea Republic of Korea (ROK) Army Chinese attacks in North Korea 75 Communist riot in POW camps 114 first CCF clash with UN forces 70 improvements under Ridgway 129 North Korean invasion 64, 70 POW treatment 111 Punchbowl 107–108 Rhee’s 1953 threat to invade North 119 and Third Phase Offensive 86 total troop casualties 136 reserve forces, U.S. 50 rest and recuperation (R&R) 88 reunification 139 Rhee, Syngman 25 as chairman of National Assembly 23 early years 18–19 peace negotiations 119 placement of ROK forces under MacArthur 31 postwar rule 136, 138 prewar belligerence towards North 25 return from exile 22–23 Seoul invasion by NKPA 32–33 Seoul liberation 60, 64 threat to invade North in 1953 119 and U.S. limits on size of South Korean Army 124

Index Ridgway, Matthew 84 appointment as UN commander 99, 130 arrival in Korea 83, 127 Chinese logistics problems exploited by 128–129 effect on troop morale 87–88 as hero of Korean War 143 and limited war 105 military background 86 as NATO commander in Europe 108 Operation Killer 91, 129 Third Phase Offensive 86 right-wing Republicans 94–95 rocket launchers 147g Roosevelt, Franklin 10, 20 Rosenberg, Julius 97 Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) 54 Royal Marine Commandos 77–78 Russian Revolution 19 Russo-Japanese War 17, 17

S saber rattling 118 Sabrejets. See F-86 Sabrejets Sandbag Castle 130–131 Sangju, South Korea 43 Sangnyong, South Korea 108 Sasebo, Japan 11 Schultz, Pete 89 Schwartz, Thomas A. xiv “search and destroy” 141–142 searchlights 135 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry 54 2nd Infantry Division, U.S. arrival in Korea 47 Heartbreak Ridge 108 “human wave” attacks against 75 Naktong Bulge 53 Punchbowl 107 segregation 42–43, 43 Senate Armed Services Committee 99–100 Senate Foreign Relations Committee 100 Seoul, South Korea 61 Chinese withdrawal from 91 Japanese occupation 17 liberation of 47, 60, 62 North Korean advance on 37–38 North Korean capture of 6 second UN/U.S. evacuation of 86

159

September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks 140 7th Fleet, U.S. 31, 67 7th Infantry Division Chosin Reservoir 77 Inchon campaign 57 North Korean invasion 65, 74 Pork Chop Hill 108 Sheldon, Jim 99 Shooting Star. See F-80 Shooting Star Siberia 19 Sikorsky H-5 helicopter 41, 90 Silla 15 Silver Star Eugene Clark 127 Thomas McLean 131 Charles Payne 50 Simmons, Edwin 58–59 Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) 16–17 60-mm mortars 30 63rd Field Artillery Battalion 38 Smith, Charles “Brad” 4, 6–7, 9 Smith, Oliver P. 77, 78 sniperscopes 125 sorties 147g South Korea Chinese invasion of 83–92, 85m contemporary status of 140 exclusion from U.S. defense perimeter 124 invasion by North Korea 1, 5m, 27–46 lack of recognition of North Korean government 24–25 South Korean National Assembly 23 Soviet Union absence from UN Security Council debates 29, 31 demise of xiii, 138–139 effects of Korean War on xii first nuclear test 12 Kim Il Sung and xi, xii, 19, 24 Korean “trusteeship” 20 and MiGs 133 and Nazi POW camps in WWII 116 nuclear weapons 21 opening of archives at end of cold war xi peace negotiations 103 post–Korean War relations with U.S. 139 and responsibility for war xi, 136 weapons for CCF 134 weapons for NKPA 124

160

Korean War

Stalin, Joseph death of 119 Kim Il Sung and xi, xii, 24 and Korean “trusteeship” 20 and puppet regimes 10 and responsibility for war xi, 136 and Soviet absence from UN Security Council debates 29 at Yalta 20 “stand or die” order 45 State Department, U.S. 27, 95, 97 Stevenson, Adlai 117 strafing defined 147g No Gun Ri controversy 44 Operation Killer 130 as tactic 125 Taejon 39 Straits of Taiwan 67 Stueck, William xii Summers, Harry G. 50 “super bazooka” 123 supply depots 147g supply lines and Chinese invasion of South Korea 84 and Chosin Reservoir 77, 78 and Third Phase Offensive 86 Suwon Air Base, South Korea 73

T T-34 tanks 10, 25 at Hwanggan 45 for NKPA 124 at Obong-ni 51 superiority of 123 and Task Force Smith 7 tactical air operations 109 tactics 122–135 Taegu, South Korea 46, 51–52 Taegu-Sanjy road 52 Taejon, fall of 38–41, 39m Taejon, South Korea 38 Taiwan confrontation with People’s Republic of China 67 exile of Nationalists to 12 and MacArthur’s North Korean plans 66, 67 tanks 10, 25, 53, 105 at Hwanggan 45 for NKPA 124

at Obong-ni 51 in Operation Killer 129 and shift in power balance 125 superiority of T-34 123 tactical use of 134 and Task Force Smith 7, 8 Task Force MacLean 77 Task Force Smith 4–9, 34, 143 taxation 93 Taylor, Maxwell 108, 141 television 102–103, 137 Tenth Corps. See x Corps 3rd Battalion, 27th Infantry Regiment 134–135 3rd Battalion, 29th Infantry Regiment 44 3rd Infantry Division 57 Third Phase Offensive 86 Third World 139 38th parallel 65 as dividing line 14 at end of cold war xiv MacArthur’s orders of air strikes 1 North Korean crossing of 26, 27 and occupation governments (1945) 21 U.S. crossing of 64 34th Infantry Regiment 35–36 This Is War (Duncan) 137 Thomas Aquinas, Saint 32 Thornton, Cordus H. 111–112 3.5-inch “super bazooka” 123 tides, at Inchon 126 Toktong Pass x Tropic Lightning Division. See 25th Infantry Division truce negotiations. See peace negotiations Truman, Harry S., and administration 3, 69 and 1949 Chinese Revolution 12 atomic weapons 81 and beginning of Korean War 27–30 and containment doctrine 11 declaration of national emergency 93 and election of 1952 116–117 and end of segregation in military 42 fear of World War III 82 foreign aid bill 28–29 and increased air operations in 1951 108–109 and MacArthur’s appointment as Korean UN commander 31 and MacArthur’s North Korean campaign 66–67, 69–70

Index and MacArthur’s removal from command 83, 96–100 and MacArthur’s role in policy decisions 137–138 and MacArthur’s Yalu River bridge bombings 73 and NSC-68 12–13 orders for troop deployment 3 orders of strikes against Korea 1, 34 and public support for war 93 Syngman Rhee and 23 and U.S. invasion of North Korea 63 Truman, Margaret 13 Truman Doctrine 11 “trusteeship” 20 tunnels 133 Turkey 11 Turkish Brigade 75, 130 25th Infantry Brigade, Canada 54 25th Infantry Division. See also 27th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division arrival in Korea 41 first combat experience 45 at Naktong Bulge 53 in North Korea 75 and Turkish Brigade 130 21st Division 35 24th Infantry Division 8 departure from U.S. 1 first battles in Korea 1, 35 return to Japan 108 at Taejon 41 24th Infantry Regiment, 25th Division 35 arrival in Korea 42, 43 and end of segregation 42–43 at Sangju 43 29th Brigade, British 91 27th Brigade, British 47 27th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division (“Wolfhounds”) Hwanggan 45 Sandbag Castle 130 Taegu 52 23rd Regiment, U.S. Army 89 Twin Tunnels, Battle of the 89

U Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War (Goncharov, Lewis, and Litai) xi

xiv-162_AAW_KoreanWar.indd 161

161

undeclared war 31 unemployment rate, U.S. 101 United Nations conference proposals for post–Korean War issues 84 Korean elections (1948) 23 Korean War as police action 31 peace negotiations 104 and U.S. plans to invade North Korea 63 United Nations Command May 1952 air offensive 110 North Korean offensive (fall 1950) 71m peace negotiations 104 at Pusan 124–125 treatment of POWs 114, 116 United Nations Security Council and beginning of Korean War 27–28 debates on U.S. resolution on invasion 29 establishment of command to defend South Korea 31 resolution authorizing intervention 1 U.S. resolutions on invasion 31 United States automobile industry 101, 101 baseball 100–101 Communist attempts to undermine war support 106 economy 100–102 election of 1950 95–96 election of 1952 95, 116–118, 138 foreign policy. See foreign policy, U.S. home front 92–103, 116–118 isolationism after WWII 12 and Korean history 16 Korean policy in late 1940s 22–23 Korean War’s effect on 139–143 during latter part of war 92–103 and limited size of South Korean Army 124 McCarthyism 94–96, 97 North Korean invasion debates 63 nuclear weapons during Korean War 21 post–WWII Korean policy 20–21 and responsibility for war 137–138 restrictions of aid to Rhee’s government (1949–1950) 25 television 102–103, 137

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162

KoRean WaR

total troop casualties ix, 136 withdrawal of troops in 1949 24 Unsan, North Korea 72

V Van Fleet, James assumption of Eighth Army command 99, 130 and Kansas Line 104, 105 and Operation Piledriver 107 and Maxwell Taylor’s assumption of Eighth Army command 108 Van Fleet, James, Jr. 110 VENONOA Project 97 Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) 67 Vietnam guerrilla war in early 1950s 12 U.S. military aid to 13 Vietnam syndrome 140 Vietnam War xii, 90, 140, 140–142 voluntary repatriation 116, 119 volunteer army 124

W Walker, Walton A. consolidation of U.S./ROK units 124 death of 126 decision to abandon North Korea 76 Inchon campaign plans 56 North Korean invasion 64 Pusan Perimeter 47, 49, 52, 60–61 as senior commander 34 “stand or die” order 45 Taegu 52 Taejon 39 war correspondents. See journalists/ journalism weapons 123–125, 129, 132–133, 134– 135. See also specific weapons weapons programs, North Korean xiv Weathersby, Kathryn xi We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Gaddis) xii, 21 Westmoreland, William C. 141–142 white phosphorus 134 Williams, Ted 100–101 Wolmi-do Island 58

xiv-162_AAW_KoreanWar.indd 162

Wonsan, North Korea 64–65 World War I (WWI), Korean War v. 122 World War II (WWII) comparisons with Korean War 122–123 Eisenhower and 117 isolationist sentiment in U.S. after 12 and Japanese battles for control of China 19–20 segregation in military 42 and Truman’s response to beginning of Korean War 29–30 and U.S. North Korean invasion plans 63 Wright, Jack 79 “wrong” war 9 Wynn, Ellison 74–75 Wyoming Line 104 Wyrick, William 143

X X Corps Chosin Reservoir 77 and Eighth Army 84–85 Inchon campaign plans 56 North Korean invasion 64, 65 Pusan Perimeter breakout 61 and Ridgway’s assumption of Eighth Army command 127

Y Yalta Conference 20 Yalu River ix, 15 first CCF clash with UN forces 70 MacArthur’s bombing plans 73 May 1952 air offensive 110 MiG attacks on U.S. planes 72 North Korean invasion 65 7th Division at 74 Yalu River hydroelectric plants 110 Yechon, South Korea 42–43 Yongdong, South Korea 42 Youn Joung 127 “yo-yo war” 125–126

Z Zhou Enlai 68, 119

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