Korea, The Terrible War We’ve Forgotten
April 12th, 2013
Author: Tom Tiede
Given the bellicose threats arriving from North Korea, it is reasonable to wonder if Washington and Pyongyang will enter into war. But that is to forget that the two nations are already at war, at least in the technical and semantic sense. The physical combat between them ended in 1953, sixty years ago this summer, but not the formal state of war. The belligerents signed an armistice then, not a peace treaty; the former is a device to stop hostilities, but only the latter can officially stop a war. All attempts to create a Korean peace treaty have thus far failed.
In this, it’s not surprising if we have forgotten the war is still in effect. In fact, we hardly remember the war was ever fought. Twenty two nations took part in the 1950-53 Korean conflict, and nearly 2 million were killed, wounded or went missing on all sides; but it was never a popularly accepted fight and faded quickly into history. Only about one in seven Americans were alive 60 years ago; the war today is a faint curiosity of the past, well out of the minds of most.
And yet.
The battles were precipitated by the same kind of ranting that exists today. The palaver then was a result of an American decision made after World War II. Washington divided the Korean peninsula, North and South, above and below the 38th parallel. The U.S. occupied the South and the Soviet Union the North. The idea was to develop conditions for reunification, but the differing political systems prevented it. Moscow installed communists in NK., and the U.S. set up anti-communists in the South. Thus, war began in the name of ideologic domination.
The West maintained (and still does) that the North began the fight by crossing the border in June, 1950. The communists say (with some justification) that the invasion was a warranted attack to halt repeated provocations by the South. In any event, the U.S. appealed to the United Nations’ Security Council. Ordinarily, the appeal would have been vetoed by the Soviet Union, a council member, but it was boycotting the group for unrelated reasons. Absent the Russians, then, the council voted to condemn the invasion and ask member nations to assist South Korea.
To be sure, the South needed all the help it could get. North Korea had a 100,000 advantage in troop numbers, and was aided materially by the Russians and Chinese. Harry Truman, then president of the U.S., worried that fighting might push the communists into a world war, but worried as well that the loss of South Korea would lead to the loss of all Asia, including Japan. The U.S. drew the line days after the North’s invasion by ordering the Seventh Fleet to duty, and using soldiers already in country to strike a first blow at the advancing N. Koreans.
That early and brief strike failed (casualties included 6,500 G.I.s, 2,900 of whom were captured). And, indeed, things went miserably for the good guys for months. The U.S. was unprepared, its U.N. allies had mostly not arrived, South Korean troops were ragtag and with scant discipline. The North’s capital (Seoul) fell almost immediately. Within days, while scores of U.S. airplanes were shot from the air, the U.S. and SK were in full and humiliating retreat. After four months the North occupied all of the South save a small Southeast corner.
Full of it, the NK leaders predicted victory before the end of 1950. But fortunes turned when U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur convinced his reluctant superiors to permit an amphibius landing at Inchon, near Seoul and 160 miles behind enemy lines. MacArthur quickly retook the capital, and proceeded north across the 38th parallel. Three weeks after Inchon, the allies seized Pyongyang, the NK capital, and proceeded toward the Yalu River, on the Chinese border. That rattled China, which, late in 1950, sent the first of 1.3 million troops to counter “U.S. aggression.”
The Chinese warriors, though badly equipped, overwhelmed the U.N. intruders and drove them back to the border. There began two years of back-and-forth fighting, described on both sides as a stalemate. The allies inflicted the most casualties, but could not gain much ground. At one point, MacArthur seriously considered using atomic weapons to end the protracted killing. Plus he believed he had the right to decide to go nuclear on his own volition, without higher approval. (It was one of several gaffs that forced Truman to replace him as commander in chief.)
At about the time the stalemate began, the various advisories initiated talks on ending the relentless bloodshed. The original delegations met near the border, and immediately bogged down in politics and nonsense. While troops and civilians continued to perish (half of the 36,000 U.S. soldiers killed in the war died after the peace talks began), the four sides argued about such matters as the seating arrangement around the peace table. They first convened in one village, quit in fury and loathing, and then reinitiated the process at another site to squabble once again.
Meantime, the war became a grim story of suffering and heroics. The Chinese were a long way from home, and poorly supplied; many of them died of starvation, and others perished from wounds that went untreated. On the American side, 135 men would be awarded the Medal of Honor, 97 of them posthumously. (Taking one at random, Capt. Bill Barber led a company of Marines in a wintertime defense of a strategic mountain pass against an enemy regiment. They held out for a week, killing 1,000. In the end, only 82 of his 220 men were able to walk away.)
Some of the engagements entered into military legend, if now only within the military itself. Heartbreak Ridge, Pork Chop Hill, the Battle of the Hook. The writer has written of men who struggled at the Chosin Reservoir, against the early Chinese invasion. Battling frostbite and outnumbered two to one, many of the U.N. units became surrounded and cut off, but fought their way out during 17 days of continuous terror. Nine thousand friendlies were killed, wounded or disappeared; the Chinese took 50,000 casualties. U.S. survivors were called “The Chosin Few.”
As for the peace talks, they might have been more quickly successful but for problems associated with the return of prisoners of war. The allies made it known that many Chinese and NK prisoners asked not to be sent back home; they wanted to start new lives in other countries. And while the U.N. said that 100,000 allied soldiers were missing in action, the communists said they only had 7,700 POWs to turn over. The arguments were settled by setting up a repatriation commission overseen by neutral nations. The armistice was then signed on July 27, 1953.
And the rest is history still unfolding. South Korea has shaken its early dictatorial governments to become the world‘s 15th most successful economic state (by GDP), while the North continues to be isolated, brutally managed, and desperately poor (about a third of the population is malnourished). The North has become a “nuclear power,” but the quotes here are an indication of the uselessness of its small stockpile; it can’t use the bombs against anyone without the instant assurance of self-annihilation. So what about the bellicose threats today? Is it going to be 1950 all over again? Almost surely not.* Neither China nor Russia would support a North Korean nuclear aggression; thus it stands alone, a pipsqueak government, staffed by twerps, impressive only in its noxious fascination with threatening the world by way of bizarre rhetoric.
--------------------------------
* Not nuclear, anyway.
April 12th, 2013
Author: Tom Tiede
Given the bellicose threats arriving from North Korea, it is reasonable to wonder if Washington and Pyongyang will enter into war. But that is to forget that the two nations are already at war, at least in the technical and semantic sense. The physical combat between them ended in 1953, sixty years ago this summer, but not the formal state of war. The belligerents signed an armistice then, not a peace treaty; the former is a device to stop hostilities, but only the latter can officially stop a war. All attempts to create a Korean peace treaty have thus far failed.
In this, it’s not surprising if we have forgotten the war is still in effect. In fact, we hardly remember the war was ever fought. Twenty two nations took part in the 1950-53 Korean conflict, and nearly 2 million were killed, wounded or went missing on all sides; but it was never a popularly accepted fight and faded quickly into history. Only about one in seven Americans were alive 60 years ago; the war today is a faint curiosity of the past, well out of the minds of most.
And yet.
The battles were precipitated by the same kind of ranting that exists today. The palaver then was a result of an American decision made after World War II. Washington divided the Korean peninsula, North and South, above and below the 38th parallel. The U.S. occupied the South and the Soviet Union the North. The idea was to develop conditions for reunification, but the differing political systems prevented it. Moscow installed communists in NK., and the U.S. set up anti-communists in the South. Thus, war began in the name of ideologic domination.
The West maintained (and still does) that the North began the fight by crossing the border in June, 1950. The communists say (with some justification) that the invasion was a warranted attack to halt repeated provocations by the South. In any event, the U.S. appealed to the United Nations’ Security Council. Ordinarily, the appeal would have been vetoed by the Soviet Union, a council member, but it was boycotting the group for unrelated reasons. Absent the Russians, then, the council voted to condemn the invasion and ask member nations to assist South Korea.
To be sure, the South needed all the help it could get. North Korea had a 100,000 advantage in troop numbers, and was aided materially by the Russians and Chinese. Harry Truman, then president of the U.S., worried that fighting might push the communists into a world war, but worried as well that the loss of South Korea would lead to the loss of all Asia, including Japan. The U.S. drew the line days after the North’s invasion by ordering the Seventh Fleet to duty, and using soldiers already in country to strike a first blow at the advancing N. Koreans.
That early and brief strike failed (casualties included 6,500 G.I.s, 2,900 of whom were captured). And, indeed, things went miserably for the good guys for months. The U.S. was unprepared, its U.N. allies had mostly not arrived, South Korean troops were ragtag and with scant discipline. The North’s capital (Seoul) fell almost immediately. Within days, while scores of U.S. airplanes were shot from the air, the U.S. and SK were in full and humiliating retreat. After four months the North occupied all of the South save a small Southeast corner.
Full of it, the NK leaders predicted victory before the end of 1950. But fortunes turned when U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur convinced his reluctant superiors to permit an amphibius landing at Inchon, near Seoul and 160 miles behind enemy lines. MacArthur quickly retook the capital, and proceeded north across the 38th parallel. Three weeks after Inchon, the allies seized Pyongyang, the NK capital, and proceeded toward the Yalu River, on the Chinese border. That rattled China, which, late in 1950, sent the first of 1.3 million troops to counter “U.S. aggression.”
The Chinese warriors, though badly equipped, overwhelmed the U.N. intruders and drove them back to the border. There began two years of back-and-forth fighting, described on both sides as a stalemate. The allies inflicted the most casualties, but could not gain much ground. At one point, MacArthur seriously considered using atomic weapons to end the protracted killing. Plus he believed he had the right to decide to go nuclear on his own volition, without higher approval. (It was one of several gaffs that forced Truman to replace him as commander in chief.)
At about the time the stalemate began, the various advisories initiated talks on ending the relentless bloodshed. The original delegations met near the border, and immediately bogged down in politics and nonsense. While troops and civilians continued to perish (half of the 36,000 U.S. soldiers killed in the war died after the peace talks began), the four sides argued about such matters as the seating arrangement around the peace table. They first convened in one village, quit in fury and loathing, and then reinitiated the process at another site to squabble once again.
Meantime, the war became a grim story of suffering and heroics. The Chinese were a long way from home, and poorly supplied; many of them died of starvation, and others perished from wounds that went untreated. On the American side, 135 men would be awarded the Medal of Honor, 97 of them posthumously. (Taking one at random, Capt. Bill Barber led a company of Marines in a wintertime defense of a strategic mountain pass against an enemy regiment. They held out for a week, killing 1,000. In the end, only 82 of his 220 men were able to walk away.)
Some of the engagements entered into military legend, if now only within the military itself. Heartbreak Ridge, Pork Chop Hill, the Battle of the Hook. The writer has written of men who struggled at the Chosin Reservoir, against the early Chinese invasion. Battling frostbite and outnumbered two to one, many of the U.N. units became surrounded and cut off, but fought their way out during 17 days of continuous terror. Nine thousand friendlies were killed, wounded or disappeared; the Chinese took 50,000 casualties. U.S. survivors were called “The Chosin Few.”
As for the peace talks, they might have been more quickly successful but for problems associated with the return of prisoners of war. The allies made it known that many Chinese and NK prisoners asked not to be sent back home; they wanted to start new lives in other countries. And while the U.N. said that 100,000 allied soldiers were missing in action, the communists said they only had 7,700 POWs to turn over. The arguments were settled by setting up a repatriation commission overseen by neutral nations. The armistice was then signed on July 27, 1953.
And the rest is history still unfolding. South Korea has shaken its early dictatorial governments to become the world‘s 15th most successful economic state (by GDP), while the North continues to be isolated, brutally managed, and desperately poor (about a third of the population is malnourished). The North has become a “nuclear power,” but the quotes here are an indication of the uselessness of its small stockpile; it can’t use the bombs against anyone without the instant assurance of self-annihilation. So what about the bellicose threats today? Is it going to be 1950 all over again? Almost surely not.* Neither China nor Russia would support a North Korean nuclear aggression; thus it stands alone, a pipsqueak government, staffed by twerps, impressive only in its noxious fascination with threatening the world by way of bizarre rhetoric.
--------------------------------
* Not nuclear, anyway.