korean war essay questions

Korean War: 4 SEQ Samples

The topic of the Korean War revolves around the reasons why it happened and whether it was a proxy war or just a civil war. These are just samples for students to refer to so that they have a model to use when answering a similar question.

For ease of download, I have included the pdf download in the box below.

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1. Explain how post-war developments in Asia and Europe impacted Korea.

( P ) Post-WWII development in Asia impacted Korea as it led to the necessity to contain the spread of communism in the Asia-Pacific.

( E ) In October 1949, China turned communist, and China signed the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance in February 1950 with the Soviet Union. The communists viewed Korea as a potential platform to expand their global influence into the Asia-Pacific. Hence, Mao, the leader of communist China, focused his attention on the assistance of North Korea, which served as a counter-balance to the American influence in Japan.  As a result, the National Security Council prepared a top-secret report called the NSC-68, stressing the importance of the Americans to contain the spread of communism on a global basis.

( E ) Thus, the communist take-over in China meant that Korea had become an essential platform over which both ideologies wanted to gain control to prevent the spread of communism.

( L ) Thus, post-war development made Korea a battleground in the Cold War.

( P ) Post-war development in Europe also significantly impacted Korea as the Soviets had gained greater leverage against Western powers.

( E ) In August 1949, the Soviet Union had successfully exploded its first atomic bomb.  This event created atomic parity with the USA, meaning that the USA could not use atomic diplomacy as an effective threat against the Soviet Union.

( E ) Therefore, by early 1950, the Soviet Union was more inclined to support a possible North Korean invasion of the South.  Kim Il-Sung approached Stalin for help in April 1950. Kim persuaded Stalin that he could easily and swiftly conquer the South.  Stalin was concerned about the alliance of America and Japan and saw this as an opportunity to counter American influence in the region.

( L ) Thus, encouraged by their attainment of atomic parity, Stalin granted Kim permission to attack the South.

2. “The Americans were responsible for the escalation of the Korean War.” How far do you agree with this statement? Explain your answer.

( P ) The escalation of the Korean War was a result of American involvement.

( E ) The American intervention triggered China’s entry into the Korean War. By Oct 1950, UN troops had captured Pyongyang, occupied two-thirds of North Korea and reached the Yalu River. The presence of the UN troops was alarming to the Chinese, who felt threatened. Hence, when they ignored the repeated Chinese warnings, China joined the North Korean troops fighting the war.

( E ) Instead of being a civil war between North and South Koreas, it escalated into a more significant regional conflict – involving the USA and its allies on one side and North Korea and China and the USSR. 

( L ) Therefore, US involvement had worsened the conflict.

( P ) However, the Americans were not to be blamed for the escalation of the Korean War.

( E ) This escalation was caused by both the Soviet Union and China. The Soviet Union and China supported Kim Il Sung’s government in North Korea. They sought to extend the communist sphere of influence. The Soviet Union also supplied the North with the weaponry that would help it to invade the South. Even though Stalin did not actively encourage Kim to invade the South, he eventually approved and asked China to help Kim. Kim Il Sung also did not take any direct action against South Korea until he had attained Stalin’s approval and support.

( E ) Therefore, the indirect involvement of the Soviet Union gave Kim the confidence to carry out the invasion, which led to the Korean War and escalated into a proxy war that saw Chinese troops and Soviet-trained troops in the war.

( L ) Thus, the Soviet Union and China were responsible for the Korean War.

( J ) In conclusion, the USA had its motivations for becoming involved in Korea as part of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Hence, the USA is responsible for escalating the Korean War. The USA saw the North Korean invasion of South Korea as part of a Soviet plan to gain hegemony in Asia and eventually control the world. As a result, they led to a significant force to counter the North Korean advance, which also led to the involvement of Chinese troops and thus escalating the Korean War.

3. “South Korea was to be blamed for the Korean War.” How far do you agree with this statement? Explain your answer.

( P ) I agree that South Korea was to be blamed for the Korean War.

( E ) Border clashes between North Korea and South Korea were standard in 1949 and 1950. South Korea started these clashes to try to capture territory in North Korea. However, Syngman Rhee’s aggressive actions in planning border clashes backfired as they failed to achieve their goals. These failed invasions set the stage for North Korea’s invasion of the South in June 1950, which started the Korean War as they convinced North Korea of the ineffectiveness of the South Korean forces.

( E ) For example, South Korean warships on North Korean military installations provoked the North Korean army and resulted in fierce fighting by both sides. It also affected the USA’s goodwill towards South Korea and made the USA even more reluctant to send heavy weapons to South Korea. As a result, these border clashes revealed the weaknesses of the South Korean forces and their inability to launch successful offensive attacks. Desertions by South Korean soldiers were common and showed the unpopularity of Rhee’s regime.

( L ) Hence, South Korea was to be blamed for the Korean War.

( P ) However, I’m afraid I disagree with the statement because the Soviet Union was also blamed for the Korean War.

( E ) The Soviet Union supported North Korea’s invasion of South Korea. In early 1950, Stalin changed his mind and became more willing to help Kim’s invasion after developments like the communist victory in China, the Soviet explosion of the atomic bomb and the US Defensive Perimeter. Hence, the Soviet Union trained the North Korean army and provided military equipment such as tanks, guns and fighter planes. As a result, Soviet support for Kim’s invasion of South Korea led to the outbreak of the Korean War.

( E ) It helped make the North Korean army strong and gave them the military capability to launch an offensive attack on South Korea. It also gave Kim the confidence to invade South Korea because he could count on Stalin and Mao to help him should the invasion go wrong. Indeed, the North Korean forces launched a surprise attack on South Korea on 25 June 1950 and started the Korean War.

( L ) Hence, USSR was to be blamed for the Korean War.

( J ) In conclusion, I partly disagree that South Korea was responsible for the Korean War. South Korea incited frequent border clashes, which increased tensions between the two sides and made the conflict inevitable. Within this setting of increasing provocation by the South, the Soviet Union could offer its support to North Korea to mount the offensive and invade South Korea, which then triggered the outbreak of the Korean War.

At the same time, Soviet Union’s financial, military, technical and logistical support for North Korea did help to make the North Korean army strong. It gave them the military capability and the confidence to launch a successful offensive attack and invasion of South Korea. Hence, both sides are responsible for the Korean War

4. “The Korean War was mainly about the reunification of the two Koreas.” How far do you agree with this statement? Explain your answer.

( P ) The Korean War was mainly because of the desire by both sides for unification. 

( E ) The Korean peninsula was halved at the 38th parallel after Japan had surrendered and Japanese soldiers left Korea. The USSR occupied the northern part temporarily and the USA the southern region. The United Nations called for an election in 1947 to establish a single government to reunite Korea, but the USSR refused to hold it. As a result, Korea splintered into two halves in 1949. Both Syngman Rhee (President of South Korea) and Kim Il Sung (President of North Korea) claimed the right to rule over Korea. As a result, there were border raids and conflicts between small groups of soldiers from the North and South.

( E ) Syngman kept provoking the North Koreans by launching raids into North Kore but failed. On the other hand, Kim was also determined to unite the Korean peninsula under communism. With the blessings of the USSR, the North Korean army invaded South Korea.

( L ) Thus, a civil war broke out with Koreans fighting against each other because both sides desired unification.

( P ) However, the Korean War was primarily due to interference by external powers.

( E ) The USSR was to be blamed for the Korean War. From the start, Stalin had backed Kim Il-Sung to run a communist government in Korea due to Stalin’s attempt to keep North Korea communist and spread communism across Asia. The USSR supplied North Korea with military equipment and training. As the leader of the communist bloc, it also encouraged China to back North Korea directly, which led to Kim daring to invade South Korea in 1950.

( E ) The USSR was thus to blame because it used Korea as the ground for a proxy war to demonstrate its superiority over its superpower rival – the United States.

( L ) Thus, the Korean War was because of external powers.

( P ) The US was also responsible for the outbreak of the Korean War.

( E ) During the Cold War, the US was determined not to let Korea fall into the hands of communism. When World War II ended, the US set up a democratic government in Korea. They even supported Syngman Rhee – a leader who abused his authority in South Korea.

( E ) As a result, when North Korean soldiers invaded South Korea, the US was determined to protect South Korea, activated a UN coalition force under its leadership, and intervened in the conflict, turning a civil war into an international problem.

( L ) Thus, the Korean War was a result of American intervention.

( J ) In conclusion, the Korean war was fundamentally a conflict between the two Koreas, as armed contact between the two Koreas had already occurred before the intervention of the US and the Soviet Union. The presence of the support of the superpowers merely sought to escalate the conflict to a new level given the increase in terms of military aid, resulting in North Korea’s crossing of the 38th Parallel in June 1950.

This is part of the History Structured Essay Question series. For more information on the Korean War, you can click here . For more information about the O level History Syllabus, you can click here . You can download the pdf version below.

Other chapters are found here:

• Treaty of Versailles
• League of Nations
• Rise of Stalin
• Stalin’s Rule
• Rise of Hitler
• Hitler’s Rule
• Reasons for World War II in Europe
• Reasons for the Defeat of Germany
• Reasons for World War II in Asia-Pacific
• Reasons for the Defeat of Japan
• Reasons for the Cold War
• Cuban Missile Crisis
• Reasons for the End of the Cold War

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Summer 2020

Korean War: Open Questions

– Gregg Brazinsky, Chen Jian, Sheila Miyoshi Jager, Jiyul Kim, and Michael Devine

Historians examine what we still need to know about the so-called “Forgotten War.”

Scholarship is driven by open questions. What don’t we know? The Korean War is no exception.

Researchers have never stopped exploring the conflict, and the opening of new archives in the U.S., Europe, and Asia are helping them do it.

For our Summer 2020 issue, “Korea: 70 Years On,” we asked four distinguished historians to address what they see as the most important open questions about the war and its legacy.

Open Question: The Lived Experience of North Koreans in the War

The Korean War was experienced in different ways by different people. Much of the literature about the war in the United States focuses on the experiences of a relatively predictable set of actors: political and military leaders and U.S. combat forces. When bookstores and public libraries have any books on the Korean war at all, they tend to be military histories that are written from the American perspective. They focus primarily on U.S. strategic thinking or the combat experience of American forces.

While the new international history of the war that developed in the 1990s expanded on this perspective by incorporating the communist world, much of it was still focused on political elites – Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin and the like. Missing from these elite-driven histories is a sense of the war’s traumatizing impact on those who felt it most viscerally: the Korean people.

For three years, the Korean War turned the entire Korean peninsula into a ghastly war zone. Millions perished and violence was endemic. The waves of retaliation and counter retaliation carried out by leftist and rightist partisans in many areas rent the fabric of Korean society so badly that it took decades to recover. Even those who survived had their lives shattered, their property destroyed, and their opportunities narrowed. Historians have been far slower to turn their attention to these more human dimensions of the war.

Even those who survived had their lives shattered, their property destroyed, and their opportunities narrowed. Historians have been far slower to turn their attention to these more human dimensions of the war

Scholars have done a little better when it comes to the war’s impact on South Korea. We now have a limited understanding of how the presence of massive numbers of UN forces, the transition to a wartime economy, and the political chaos caused by the fall and recapture of cities and villages permanently changed life in South Korea. Our understanding of these phenomenon is still insufficient, but it is growing nonetheless as the most recent generation of historians finds new sources and tests different theoretical approaches.

The lived experience of war in the North has been almost completely neglected. When Americans pay attention to wartime North Korea at all, they mostly see a place where their armies slaughtered – and were slaughtered by – a ferocious and evil adversary, and a landscape in which major cities were transformed into ashes and rubble by relentless aerial bombing.

Americans don’t see it as a place where real human beings struggled for survival, mourned the loss of family members, and suffered permanent trauma because of the three years that they spent living under constant fear of death. And they care little about the social or cultural history of the war there. As a result, we know about the massive bombing campaigns carried out by American fighter planes and wartime atrocities committed by South Korean forces in North Korea. Yet we don’t understand much about their real human impact.

When it comes to everyday life in North Korea during the Korean War, there are many basic questions that are still unanswered: How did North Koreans learn to cope with the violence and loss that surrounded them? How did they see their own leaders, their obligations to their country, and the demands of military service? What were social relations between North Koreans and the hundreds of thousands of Chinese Volunteers who crossed the Yalu to fight alongside them like? There is scarcely a single book in the English language that takes any of these questions as its main point of departure.

Historians urgently need to start asking these questions. Contemporary North Korea cannot be understood without first understanding the complete suspension of everything that was considered normal there during the war. One of the reasons that, seventy years later, the Korean War has still not officially ended is Americans don’t realize how these experiences hardened North Korean hatred and mistrust of the United States.

For Americans who take media representations of North Korea as a bizarre rogue state at face value, Pyongyang’s unyielding commitment to its nuclear program seems hostile and irrational. But in North Korea, where the war is critical to the state’s raison d’être, the suffering that it caused remains a critical part of the society’s collective historical memory – and colors how North Koreans and their leaders see almost every issue. A powerful military is seen first and foremost not as a way of threatening neighbors, but as a way of preventing the horrors that were visited on North Korea seventy years ago from happening again.

None of this is to say that North Koreans were innocent victims during the Korean War, or that they did not commit an ample number of their own atrocities in South Korea. The evidence that it was Kim Il Sung who turned a smoldering civil war into a full-scale international conflict is undisputable, as is the evidence of the terror inflicted on South Korea by DPRK forces during the summer of 1950.

But this does not mean we should not recognize the basic humanity of our former adversary. If we do not do so, the Korean War might never end, and could even be reignited.

Gregg A. Brazinsky is professor of history and international affairs at the George Washington University. He is the author of Winning the Third World: Sino-American Rivalry during the Cold War and Nation Building in South Korea: Korean, Americans, and the Making of a Democracy . Follow him on Twitter @GBrazinsky.

Open Question: The “Long Peace” Between America and China

One of the great open questions about the Korean War regards what did not happen after the armistice was signed in July 1953.

In retrospect, it is almost miraculous that another Korea-style direct military confrontation between China and the United States did not happen for almost two decades following the end of the conflict. The possibility of such a confrontation was virtually eliminated only by the Chinese-American rapprochement in the early 1970s.

This Chinese-American “long peace” has been largely ignored by scholars of Chinese-American relations. Yet the absence of a war between China and America in the wake of the Korean War should in no circumstances be taken for granted.

Throughout the 1950s and the 1960s, China and the United States regarded each other as a mortal enemy. For Beijing, “imperialist America” was China’s number one foe, serving as a principal justification of its support to revolutionary insurgences in East Asia. This animus was also the main source of Mao Zedong’s excessive domestic mobilization, which culminated in such disastrous Maoist programs as the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

For Washington, Communist China, compared with the Soviet Union, was a “more daring, therefore, more dangerous enemy.” Although the emphasis of America’s global Cold War strategy lay in Europe, and the Soviet Union was America’s presumed primary enemy, a large portion of America’s resources also were deployed in East Asia to cope with the “Chinese communist threats” there.

It is no surprise, then, that at several critical moments of tension in the wake of the Korean War, China and the United States could have easily slid into another Korea-style war – or an even more destructive conflict. Yet it was also the memory of Korea, as well as the lessons that Beijing and Washington had learned from it, that effectively prevented China and the United States from engaging in another direct military confrontation.

Vietnam is a case in point. In the spring and summer of 1954, it seemed the Vietnamese Communists, backed by China, would soon grasp victory in the First Indochina War. U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower adopted the “domino theory” to describe Washington’s perception of the grave impact of allowing communist revolutions following the Chinese model to spread unchecked in East Asia.

Chinese policymakers noted Washington’s warnings. The Chinese repeatedly called their Vietnamese comrades’ attention to the danger of a “direct American intervention.” At a crucial meeting with Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nyugen Giap in early July 1954, Zhou Enlai spent many long hours beseeching the Vietnamese to abandon their pursuit of “total victory” in the war.

“We must remember the lessons of Korea,” Zhou emphasized, “the most important is to avoid an American intervention.” Ho and Giap accepted Zhou’s advice, opening the door to the Geneva Peace Accord on Indochina.

In retrospect, it is almost miraculous that another Korea-style direct military confrontation between China and the United States did not happen for almost two decades following the end of the conflict.

In the Taiwan Straits crises of 1958, China and the United States once again faced the grim prospect of a direct military showdown. Both sides showed restraint. When the Chinese artillery units shelled the Nationalist-controlled Jinmen islands, Mao emphatically ordered his frontal commander to ensure that “American ships would not be hit.” On the American side, U.S. warships tasked with protecting Nationalist convoys stayed beyond the range of the Chinese artillery, so as to avoid undesirable incidents.

In spring 1965, as the Vietnam War was rapidly escalating, both Chinese and American policymakers kept the lessons of Korea in their minds. Zhou and Chen Yi, China’s foreign minister, asked Pakistan and Britain to help deliver the following messages to President Lyndon B. Johnson: (I) China will not provoke war with the United States; (II) What China says counts; (III) China is prepared; and (IV) If the United States bombs China that would mean war and there would be no limits to it.

Zhou specifically mentioned that the Americans had failed to heed the warning message that he sent to Washington, via India, before China intervened in Korea. This time, China also changed the delivery channel, swapping a dubious intermediary for two staunch American geopolitical allies.

Washington treated the Chinese warning signals seriously this time. From 1965 to 1969, China dispatched a total of 320,000 engineering and anti-aircraft troops to North Vietnam. Yet no Chinese combat troops were sent to Vietnam. U.S. ground forces did not invade North Vietnam, and aerial bombing of the North was confined to areas north of the 20th parallel, keeping a “safe distance” from Chinese borders. Another Chinese-American war indeed was avoided.

There was a sophisticated yet crucial reason for this which should be highlighted. Beijing and Washington regarded each other as enemies. But it seems that each side was willing to count on the consistent, “limited rationality” of the other to avoid another Korea-type war. There appeared to exist a critical “mutual confidence” of a certain kind in Beijing’s and Washington’s strategic thinking in the wake of Korea. Without acknowledging the legitimacy of the other side’s policy goals and ideological commitments, leaders of both countries nevertheless held a degree of faith in the other side’s willingness and capacity to persist in a limited and pragmatic course of action in accordance with its own rationale, logic and perceived interests.

Beijing’s international strategies and policies, upon examination, reflect a specific truth: In spite of its aggressive rhetoric and behavior, Mao's China was not an expansionist power as the term is typically defined in Western strategic discourse. Though it did use force, Beijing’s aim was not direct control of foreign territory or resources. Rather, China sought the spread of its revolution's influence to "hearts and minds" around the world. It was this aspiration for "centrality," rather than the pursuit of "dominance," that characterized the foreign policy of Mao's China.

The factors I describe above not only led to a “long peace.” They also present important implications for understanding China's external behavior then, now, and in the future. They merit closer examination and further study.

Chen Jian is Distinguished Global Network Professor of History at NYU-Shanghai and NYU. He is also Hu Shih Professor of History Emeritus at Cornell University. He is nearing completion of a major biography of Zhou Enlai.

Open Question: The Lasting Legacies of Korean War Special Operations

The failure rate of the missions was shocking , the full scope of which we still do not know because the records are incomplete, lost or remain inaccessible. In a literal sense, the history of Special Operations in Korea is truly the forgotten part of the Forgotten War. Thousands of Koreans – we do not know the actual number – never returned from their suicidal missions behind enemy lines in North Korea during the Korean War. Their courage and lives were expendable. But their sacrifices, and those of the Americans who led them, helped to restore U.S. unconventional and covert warfare capabilities that were almost completely eliminated after the Second World War.

The Korean War caught the United States with its proverbial pants down. The post-World War II demobilization precipitously reduced the Armed Forces by nearly 90 percent – from over 12 million to 1.5 million by June 1947. For many service personnel, the pace was too slow and demands for faster demobilization were backed with protests and demonstrations. The process, by necessity both political and social, was “willy-nilly,” and the consequences for military capability and readiness were devastating. In September 1946, the War Department estimated that the combat effectiveness was down to just 25 percent for all units in the Pacific. A 1952 Army study concluded, “When future scholars evaluate the history of the United States during the first-half of the twentieth century they will list World War II demobilization as one of the cardinal mistakes.”

A little noticed loss in the demobilization was the almost complete elimination of special operations units. World War II had spawned a plethora of these organizations – famed units such as Army Rangers, Navy Underwater Demolition Teams (UDT), Marine Raiders, and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) – that accumulated an expertise paid for in blood. They conducted the kind of irregular, covert and clandestine activities known as special operations. These military activities were usually conducted behind enemy lines and ranged from intelligence collection and direct actions such as raids, sabotage, assassination, and kidnapping to guerilla warfare and psychological operations.

The landmark National Security Act of 1947, which reorganized how the U.S. would handle the foreign policy and military challenges of the Cold War, created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to provide national-level strategic intelligence. The scope of its concerns was quickly expanded to include covert paramilitary operations of the kind conducted by wartime organizations.

A year later, the National Security Council decided that the CIA would be responsible for, among other things, covert propaganda, sabotage, and subversion operations to include guerilla warfare. The military initially endorsed the decision, but the outbreak of the Korean War changed all this. For one thing, General Douglas MacArthur’s Far East Command (FEC) quickly recognized the need for developing these capabilities itself. The war had served as an abrupt reminder that their elimination had been premature and unwise.

Thousands of Koreans – we do not know the actual number – never returned from their suicidal missions behind enemy lines in North Korea during the Korean War.

In June 1950, the military had minimal special operations capability, and the CIA, due to MacArthur’s personal animosity, only had a 3-person cell in Tokyo to cover all of East Asia. By January 1951, however, a multitude of ad-hoc organizations had sprung up under FEC, the Navy and Air Force components of FEC, Eighth U.S. Army in Korea (EUSAK), and the CIA, conducting covert intelligence collection, raids, sabotage, kidnapping, and guerilla operations as well as dropping millions of leaflets weekly and broadcasting around the clock over radio and loudspeakers.

Thousands of Korean agents and guerillas, recruited from anti-Communist North Korean refugees and led by Americans, were inserted into North Korea by land, air and sea. The operations continued and expanded as the war dragged on, exacting increasingly heavy casualties. This toll grew especially heavy after the frontlines had stabilized in the summer of 1951, and Communist forces tightened rear area security. Chinese and North Korean security was so effective that in the last two years of the war, nearly every parachute-inserted agent was killed or captured. By the time of the armistice in July 1953, thousands of Korean agents and guerillas had been sent into North Korea – and were never heard from again.

Aside from the danger, these operations suffered from deep systemic and structural dysfunction arising from competing interests and culture of the sponsoring organizations, as well as a lack of experience and expertise. The diffused organizations conducting operations could not get along and cooperate for the greater good. One attempt in late 1951 to bring a semblance of order to covert actions was badly botched and only worsened the strained relationships between competing interests. The result was duplication of effort and increased risk. It was not unusual to find an aircraft departing for North Korea with agents and guerillas from two or more units on uncoordinated missions.

Did special operations affect the course and outcome of the conflict? Tragically, most historians agree that the effort had only a marginal impact on the war. But something of long-term consequence did emerge from the adversity and dysfunction: a reconstitution of these capabilities.

A decade after the Korean War Armistice, covert operations and unconventional warfare became widely and deliberately utilized in the war in Vietnam. Special operations not only played a large role in that conflict but represented the initial U.S. response before conventional forces were even committed. Among these new post-Korean War capabilities included the creation of the Army Special Forces, the evolution of the Navy UDTs to become SEALs, and the refinement of CIA paramilitary capabilities. The continued evolution and expansion of special operations reached its pinnacle with the formation of the U.S. Special Operations Command in 1987 and its dominant role in the post-9/11 War on Terrorism.

The Korean War triggered a revival of U.S. special operations that has had a continuing and expanding legacy. The full story of the conflict’s special operations awaits the declassification and release of records, especially from the CIA and China. It is a story that will clarify the sacrifices of thousands of Koreans who vanished behind enemy lines and whose service to their country have only been recently recognized. It will also help us to appreciate the significance of the Korean War for understanding the unique history of Special Operations and its place within the broader field of U.S. military history.

Sheila Miyoshi Jager is Professor of East Asian Studies at Oberlin College. Her most recent book is Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea . She is finishing a new book project, The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia, 1876-1905 , which is forthcoming from Harvard University Press.

Jiyul Kim is a retired U.S. Army officer with over 28 years of service. He is a Visiting Instructor of History at Oberlin College.

Sheila Miyoshi Jager and Jiyul Kim are collaborating on The Korean War: A New History, which is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

Open Question: Memorials – Remembering an Unfinished War?

Historians have not yet written the final chapter of the Korean War, even as memorials to the never-ended conflict rise across the American landscape.

Often referred to as the “Forgotten War,” the Korean conflict of 1950 through 1953 was sandwiched between World War II of the “Greatest Generation” and the long tragic nightmare of Vietnam. However, the Korean War has never been forgotten by historians.

In recent decades, an avalanche of significant new studies has provided a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the war’s origins, conduct, and consequences. As the war continues, halted only by an uneasy armistice that has lasted for nearly seventy years, studies of the Korean War proliferate. Their profusion has been made possible, in part, by access to greater international materials made available to scholars by the newly-opened archives and the declassification of government documents.

Meanwhile, manuscripts, memoirs and oral histories of participants in the conflict continue to surface. These new primary sources present historians with a further appreciation of the complex and continuing struggle for dominance on the Korean peninsula.

Public memory provides an additional area of exploration for the study of the Korean War, and examining how wars are remembered in popular culture, museums, memorials, and historic sites, has increasingly attracted the attention of the scholarly community. Both remembrance, as well as the need to acknowledge the costs and ravages of war, have become an essential element of a national psyche. And in recent years, our nation has experienced a memory boom, whether dealing with international warfare of the early 20th century or the fragmentation of warfare since 1945. In the United States, memorials now tend to be more inclusive of ethnic and racial minorities who fought in these wars, and the service of women in conflict. They also tend to focus on the soldiers who saw combat, instead of great generals, or leading political figures. Furthermore, it is the veterans of these wars and their families who have taken the lead in advocating for these memorials, as well as in funding and creating them.

War memorials can provide a means to examine the long and complex process of establishing a collective memory. The Korean War is a remarkable example of how a nation's public memory of an event can be formed and reshaped over several decades in the midst of ever-changing international dynamics. The American public memory of the Korean War has been influenced by the nation’s subsequent experience of the Vietnam War experience, and the establishment of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The dramatic improvement in the image of the Republic of Korea – as well as its rising world status following the success of the 1988 Seoul Olympics – has also played a role. The sudden end of the Cold War, and South Korea’s emergence as a democracy and prosperous “Asian Tiger,” have led to a feeling that the “police action” in Korea had been worthwhile.

Both remembrance, as well as the need to acknowledge the costs and ravages of war, have become an essential element of a national psyche.

Initially, the creation of the Korean War Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. presented a set of unusual challenges to those involved in its long and contentious planning process. When the project began in the late 1980s, the Korean conflict remained highly unpopular, and also had been largely forgotten by an American public still recovering from the traumas of the Vietnam conflict. Furthermore, the U.S.-led intervention in Korea had never even been declared formally as a war – and the conflict has never officially ended.

A fractious process finally led to the dedication of a striking and popular monument in July 1995. Yet many critics, including the influential Korean War Veterans Association, remain unsatisfied by it. They have demanded a wall of remembrance that lists the names of those killed or missing in the conflict, similar to that which comprises the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. And just like the war in Korea, the Korean War Veterans Memorial remains unfinished and, ironically, depends on funding from South Korean sources.

Even before the Korean War Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington D.C., communities across the nation were establishing memorials to commemorate the experiences and the sacrifices of those who fought in the conflict. And like the monument on the National Mall, these numerous and diverse endeavors tell us much about those who are compelled to memorialize the war.

One learns from these efforts that the Korean War is now clearly understood by the American public as victory for the United States, the United Nations, and the Republic of Korea. It is also clear that the American public now sees the Republic of Korea as worth the sacrifice made to save it from a communist takeover, and the Korean-American community in the United States is viewed with respect and appreciation. This feeling appears to be largely reciprocated by the Republic of Korea and the Korean-American community, both of which have significantly participated in the funding planning and dedicating of local memorials.

The Korean War may not yet have reached its end. But the writing of its history, as well as the process of its memorialization, has sought to establish the conflict’s place in the pantheon of American wars.

Michael J. Devine is an Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Wyoming. From 2001 until his retirement in 2014, he served as director of the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library. He has twice been named a Senior Fulbright Lecturer to Korea (1995 and 2017-2018), and was the Houghton Freeman Professor of American History at the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Graduate Center in 1998 and 1999. He is the author of John W. Foster: Politics and Diplomacy in the Imperial Era, 1877-1917 (1981), and the editor of Korea in War, Revolution and Peace: The Recollections of Horace G. Underwood (2001).

( Cover photograph: The UN flag waves over a crowd waiting to hear Syngman Rhee speak to the United Nations Council in Taegu, Korea on July 30, 1950. National Archives and Records Administration)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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SUGGESTED RESOURCES

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

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

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

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

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

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Lesson Plan: The Korean War

The Beginning of the Korean War

Description

On June 25, 1950, North Korea surprised South Korea by invading and advancing towards the capital city of Seoul. Soon after, President Truman sent U.S. troops to aid the South Korean military, and a U.N. Security Council resolution was pushed through to send additional troops and aid to bolster existing South Korean and U.S. forces. An armistice was signed in July 1953, ending the active fighting of the war and creating a demilitarized zone separating the two countries, although a peace treaty has never been signed. In this lesson, students will learn about the causes, significance, and legacy of the Korean War.

INTRODUCTION

As a class, view the following video clip and then discuss the questions below.

Video Clip: The Beginning of the Korean War (6:14)

Explain the circumstances in Korea between 1945 and 1950 that led to the Korean War.

Why did North Korea want to invade South Korea, beginning in 1948? What dissuaded them from invading at that time? What emboldened them to invade in 1950?

How did the Truman administration view the invasion? What steps did the administration take?

• Explain the decision of the United Nations Security Council. According to Mr. Brazinsky, what was the view and reaction of the U.S. Congress in relation to President Truman and our involvement in Korea?

Break students into groups and have each group view the following video clips. Students should take notes using the handout provided, and then share their findings with the rest of the class.

HANDOUT: Korean War Handout (Google Doc)

Video Clip: North Korea Invades South Korea (1:39)

The U.S. Army "Big Picture" episode shows footage of the North Korea invasion and the United Nations response.

Video Clip: President Truman Korean War Address (0:51)

President Truman addressed the nation on why the U.S. must intervene in the Korean War.

Video Clip: The Countries Involved in the Korean War (2:19)

Christopher Kolakowski described the role of the United Nations and the countries involved in the Korean War.

Video Clip: Korean War Military Action (3:52)

Professor Lisa Brady gives an overview of the military strategy and progress during the Korean War.

Video Clip: Gen. Douglas MacArthur's Role in the Korean War (2:32)

GWU History Professor Gregg Brazinsky discusses Gen. Douglas MacArthur's role in leading U.S. forces during the Korean War, and his interactions with President Truman and his administration.

Video Clip: China's Involvement in the Korean War (1:43)

GWU History Professor Gregg Brazinsky on China's involvement in the Korean War, including their concerns over America's involvement in the war.

Video Clip: The Armistice and Legacy of the Korean War (2:16)

Christopher Kolakowski described the armistice to end the fighting of the Korean War and its signficance today.

TAKE A STAND

After discussing the findings from the video clips with the entire class, have the students take part in a "Take a Stand" activity with the following question.

"The United States made the correct decision in entering the Korean War"

Have students line up on a continuum based on their opinion from “Strongly Agree” to “Strongly Disagree.” Ask several students from different points on the line to share their reasoning and defend their position.

After completing the "Take a Stand" activity, have students write an essay (or similar culminating activity) that includes the following information. Students should cite specific examples from the videos and class discussion.

The causes of the Korean War and the involvement of the United States and United Nations

Major military actions and the role of General MacArthur

The significance of the armistice then and today

• The impact of the Korean War in the context of the greater Cold War

Additional Resources

• ON THIS DAY: Korean War
• BELL RINGER: Korean War
• 38th Parallel
• Demilitarized Zone
• General Douglas Macarthur
• North Korea
• South Korea
• United Nations

The Korean War

• The Korean War /
• Discussion & Essay Questions

Cite This Source

Available to teachers only as part of the teaching the korean warteacher pass, teaching the korean war teacher pass includes:.

• Assignments & Activities
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Sample of Discussion & Essay Questions

 big picture.

• Why did China send troops into Korea?
• Ideological
• Would China have reason to feel threatened by MacArthur's advance?

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Home — Essay Samples — War — Korean War

Essays on Korean War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Role of The Korean War in History

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

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Historical Accuracy of The Book Korean War by Maurice Isserman

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

25 June, 1950 - 27 July, 1953

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

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

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

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

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Overview of the lesson

This lesson made use of the visual essay writing approach which I outlined in this blogpost .

My Higher Level IB Historians had just concluded their studies of the causes, events and consequences of the Korean War on ActiveHistory .

To consolidate their knowledge, 25 political cartoons about the Korean War were shared between the members of the class. Working individually to start with, and then with a partner, they analysed the meaning of each cartoon. Then, collaborating as a group, they decided how best to categorise, link and annotate the cartoons to create a "gallery walk" about the conflict.

The end product was a superb piece of display and an excellent revision aid.

If you wish to try the same activity with your own students, you can download all the collection of cartoon sources in this album (click the three dots in the top corner of the screen and choose 'download all').

You can also watch the following "warts and all" video of my one-hour lesson below, which can be broken down as follows:

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Memory Bank Multiple Perspectives on the Korean War

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Multiple Perspectives on the Korean War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[ Video: James Argires – Perspectives ]

[ Video: Howard Ballard – Perspectives ]

[ Video: Glenn Paige – Perspectives ]

More History

Prewar Context: Western

North Koreans Stream Toward Pusan

The Korean War: Barbarism Unleashed

    Contents

“Massacre in Korea” by Pablo Picasso, 1951

I. Introduction: Contrasting views

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

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

Domestic politics and bipartisan support for the war

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

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

Chinese counterattack and American retreat

High noon: the truman-macarthur stand-off.

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

IV. Public opinion and antiwar dissent in the United States

• Manufacturing consent: Media coverage of the war

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

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

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

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

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

• Dirty little secrets: Maltreatment of prisoners of war

Allegations of biological warfare

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

Racism and class stratification in the U.S. Army

• Canada and Great Britain’s Korean War

Legacies of the war

Recommended resources, about the author, did you know.

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

Korean War Memorial in Washington

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

Korean War Monument in Seoul

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

Korean War Memorial in Pyongyang

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

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

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

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

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

Yo Unhyong, South Korean leader who sought peaceful unification

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kim II-Sung and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin

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

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

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

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

Brutal anti-communist pacification in South Korea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Southern provocations and the origins of the Korean War

Secretary of State Dean Acheson

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

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

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

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

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

Vito Marcantonio

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

General Douglas MacArthur and Syngman Rhee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inchon landing

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

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

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

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

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

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

MacArthur heads to the Yalu River

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

F86 Sabre jet fighter, Jan. 31, 1951

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

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

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

U.S. fighter aircraft loaded with rockets

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

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

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

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

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

Pyongyang after U.S. bombing, 1953

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

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

Manufacturing consent:  Media coverage of the war

Noam Chomsky

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

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

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

Wilfred Burchett: Reporting the Other Side

Australian correspondent Wilfred G. Burchett

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

Historian and presidential adviser Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Singer Paul Robeson

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

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

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

Folk singer Woodie Guthrie

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

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

Film star Marilyn Monroe helped boost morale in Korea

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

U.S. soldiers learn of the armistice

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slaughter of South Korean prisoners at Taejon by North Koreans

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

No Gun Ri Peace Park Memorial

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

Dirty little secrets:  Mistreatment of prisoners of war

North Korean prisoners of war

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

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

Chinese and North Korean POWs at a UN Command prison

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

U.S. soldiers

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

Canada’s and Great Britain’s Korean War

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

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

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

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

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

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

*          *          *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[39]  Kim, The Unending Korean War .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[128]  Manchester, American Caesar , 780.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[153]  Franklin, War Stars .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[177]  Ibid., 109.

[178]  Ibid., 238.

[179]  Ibid., 250.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[248]  Harden, King of Spies , 9.

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

[250]  Harden, King of Spies , 108.

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

[252]  Harden, King of Spies , 9.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[264]  Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cite this article:

Korean War: History, Causes, and Effects Essay

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

Bibliography

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

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

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

• Ideological

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

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

American and Soviet military occupation in North and South Korea.

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

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

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

Military and strategic imbalance between North and South Korea

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this expedition, the North Korea people’s army used heavy military equipment such as 105T-34 and T-85 tanks, 150 Yak fighters and 200 artillery pieces. The South Korean forces were ill prepared for such offensive and within days they were overran by the advancing Northern army. Most of Southern forces either surrendered or joined the Northern Korean army.

In response to this aggression, the then American president Henry Truman gave an order to general Mac Arthur who was stationed in Japan to transfer the troops in Japan to combat in Korea.

The battle of Osan was the first involvement of the American army in the Korean war. The war involved a task force comprised of 540 infantry men from 24 th infantry division on July 5 th 1950.

This task force was unsuccessful in its campaign to repel the North Korean army and instead suffered a casualty of 180 soldiers of whom were either dead, wounded or taken prisoner. The task force lacked effective military equipment to fight the North Koreans T-34 and T-85 tanks. The American 24 th division suffered heavy loses and were pushed back to Taejeon.

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

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

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

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

On July 10 th 1951, there was a stalemate between the two warring sides which led to armistice being negotiated. The negotiation went on for the next two years. The armistice deal was reached with formation of Korean demilitarized zone ending the war. Both sides withdrew for their combat position. The U.N. was given the mandate to see a peaceful and fair resolution of the conflict in the effort to end the war. The war resulted to about 1,187,682 deaths and unprecedented destruction of property [2] .

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

The Korean conflict also brought into focus in future efforts to win communism from spreading allover the world. The United States realized that the best solution to stop the spreading of communism ideology was to be military in nature. The war also made America to recognize China as a powerful military might in Asia. Future diplomatic actions would need to take into account Chinas potential might [3] .

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

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

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

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

• William, Stueck. The Korean war : An international history. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997.
• Brian, Fitzgerald. The Korean war: American’s forgotten wa r. Minneapolis: Compass Point Books, 2006.
• Tenzerh, Feldman. The Korean war . Minneapolis: Twenty-First Century Books, 2004.
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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Korean War Key Debates

Read some of our debate questions to help get some inspiration for your own work.

• KEY INDIVIDUALS
• KEY DEBATES

Why did the Korean War break out?

Kim Il Sung frequently claimed that the Korean War broke out because the South attacked the North at Haeju in June 1950. However, there is little evidence to support this and even if there were, it would do little to justify the DPRK’s full scale invasion across the 38th parallel in the same month. North Korean aggression is an obvious cause of the conflict but its roots are more complex. Korea was scarred by decades of colonial oppression at the hands of the Japanese and when they withdrew in 1945, they left a volatile and divided nation in their wake. Both superpowers were determined that Korea should not become an ideological and economic ally of the other and this led to the divide along the 38th parallel because neither the USSR or the USA would trust the other to oversee Korea’s transition to independence. Although it was Kim Il Sung who ordered the opening of hostilities in 1950, his aims were ironically similar to those of Syngman Rhee; both leaders were discontent with the supposedly temporary divide that had been created after WW2 and both wished to reunite the country under their own style of government. By facilitating the creation of two diametrically opposed regimes, America and the Soviet Union must bear some responsibility for what followed, particularly because Stalin gave Kim the green light for the invasion to occur. Nevertheless, the conflict was essentially a civil one, fought between two indigenous leaders with a very different vision of the country’s future. 

Essays on the Cause of War

The Causes of the Korean War in 1950

The Korean War

Why did the US intervene in the Korean War?

Within two days of the northern invasion, the US were pressing the UN for intervention and offering to provide the vast majority of troops. Their willingness to get involved can be understood on a number of levels and there were strategic and domestic explanations operating alongside Truman’s determination to contain communism. The essence of communist ideology threatened the American way of life by challenging the need for international trade and abandoning democratic principles. If Kim Il Sung’s regime was able to dominate the whole of Korea, it would increase the vulnerability of US allies in the region, including Japan and Taiwan. It would also suggest that communist aggression would be tolerated, bolstering the confidence of both the USSR and China. Despite Dean Acheson claiming that Korea lay outside of the US’ planned defensive perimeter in Asia, there may well have been a desire to protect Rhee’s regime. The South Korean leader was by no means democratic but he spent his youth and early career in America and they had championed his bid for leadership as they withdrew in 1948. Domestically, Truman was under a great deal of pressure to appear tough on communism after he failed to prevent Mao’s triumph in China and as McCarthy’s supposed exposure of Soviet spies within the State Department caused alarm amongst the public. He also firmly believed in the monolithic (rigid) nature of communism and therefore perceived that the war was being directed from Moscow. It is possible that the rich resources of tin, tungsten and aluminium reserves further motivated the US President but this was unlikely to be decisive; more must have been at stake if so many US lives were to be risked. 

Essays on US Intervention

How far was the USA's military involvement in Korea the consequence of a desire to defend democracy?

To what extent did the Domino Theory cause continued US support for South Korea in the period 1950-1953?

What was the impact of Chinese involvement in the Korean War?

The People’s Republic of China had backed Kim Il Sung’s invasion plans prior to the war but they did not commit to sending troops until the conflict neared the Chinese border. The entry of Chinese fighters on October 25th 1950 had a dramatic impact on the conflict, firstly by turning the tide of UN progress through a resounding defeat at the Battle of Unsan (1st November 1950). Mao’s decision also encouraged the Soviets to become more heavily involved as the USSR began to provide air cover for Chinese and North Korean fighters. Undoubtedly, Chinese involvement prolonged the conflict because by the spring of 1951, it was evident that neither force was strong enough to defeat the other and a stalemate developed. The potentially limitless supply of both UN and Chinese troops meant it was difficult to see how this stalemate could be broken and so Chinese involvement perhaps also encouraged both the Koreans and the UN to enter into peace negotiations. It seems likely that the UN efforts beyond the 38th parallel would have succeeded if the North Koreans had faced the assault alone and so Chinese involvement was crucial to the survival of Kim Il Sung’s regime and also the subsequent reinstatement of the 38th parallel itself. For China itself, the consequences of involvement were mixed. 150,000 soldiers were killed and the conflict caused significant financial strain. However, the Chinese proved their loyalty to communist allies and also demonstrated their strength to the world, raising their prestige

Essays About China

How significant was Chinas intervention in deciding the course and outcome of the Korean War?

Was the Korean War a Product of the Cold War tensions?

Who were the main winners and losers of the Korean War?

Ultimately, the Korean War was a conflict without winners. Neither Kim Il Sung nor Syngman Rhee were content with the reinstatement of the 38th parallel but both knew it was preferable to having lost the conflict altogether. To some extent, the willingness of both the UN and the Chinese to intervene to support their respective allies offered both Korean nations some level of protection by acting as a deterrence against future attack. Although there have been skirmishes and threats, the Korean people have experienced relative peace in the years since the 1953 armistice, suggesting some gains from the war. However, the Korean people suffered greatly during the three years of fighting, with approximately 140,000 South Korean soldiers dead and at least twice that for the North. In addition to this, 2.5million civilians lost their lives, predominantly in the North. Regardless of which side of the border they were on, the war did little to bring political freedom to the country, with both regimes being led by dictators who relied on force to maintain their position. For the US, the war achieved containment but not rollback, and their decision to cross the 38th parallel appeared to make the latter their aim. It also led to 36,534 US deaths and contributed to the losses the Democrats suffered in the 1952 election. However, intervention not only dissuaded Kim Il Sung from further invasion but also offered some level of security to other allies in the region, including Japan and Taiwan. For China, the extensive loss of life has to be balanced against the extent to which they proved their military abilities and potential role on the world stage. 

Essays About After The War

Consequences of the Korean War.

International Human Rights Laws - North Korea.

Korean War Research Topics

Scott neuffer.

Many questions remain about the bloody conflict that consumed the Korean Peninsula from 1950 to 1953. Students of history will find no shortage of research topics about the causes of the Korean War, the role of different nations and individuals in the conflict, and its effects today as hostilities persist along the 38th Parallel between North Korea and South Korea.

Explore this article

• Geopolitical Causes
• The Chinese Relationship
• The Role of MacArthur
• Casualties and Missing Soldiers

1 Geopolitical Causes

The Korean War pitted the resources of North Korea’s communist backers, China and the Soviet Union, against the resources of South Korean allies, chiefly the United States, along the 38th Parallel boundary that had been established after World War II. In a 2011 article for “The Asia-Pacific Journal,” Korean history professor Mark E. Caprio breaks down the political dynamics preceding the war, including North Korea’s ability to play its allies off each other to gain support. Research students can focus on how Soviet and Chinese involvement reflected each country’s national goals in the region. By the same measure, students can explore how American involvement reflected U.S. Cold War policy at the time.

2 The Chinese Relationship

China’s relationship with North Korea was, and still is, complex. Chinese forces entered the war in the fall of 1950, and eventually were able to push American and South Korean forces back below the 38th Parallel. Caprio argues that the Chinese were less interested in helping their communist ally and more interested in protecting their own sovereignty, fearing “the United States might act on its pledge to rollback communism beyond North Korean territory.” Research students can trace how the Korean War shaped China’s present-day relationship with North Korea and with the greater international community that has tried to regulate the repressive hermit state.

3 The Role of MacArthur

Scholars still debate the role U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur played in the Korean War. The famous general, who led successful offensives in World War II and oversaw reconstruction of Japan, suffered defeat in Korea at the hands of the Chinese military. MacArthur was eventually relieved of command after criticizing President Harry Truman’s strategy in the region as not being aggressive enough. One research topic provided by the Huntsville-Madison County Public Library explores whether MacArthur unnecessarily prolonged the conflict. Students can investigate this question themselves, using research to decide if MacArthur or the Chinese were to blame for the length of the war.

4 Casualties and Missing Soldiers

There are a variety of research topics pertaining to casualties and missing-in-action statistics of the Korean War. According to Korean War Educator, a not-for-profit website, America suffered more than 36,000 casualties in the conflict. Students can research specific battles in terms of casualties, or how American casualties compare to estimates for North Korean and Chinese forces. They can also assess the overall impact of the Korean War in terms of human lives. According to the same website, 8,215 Americans are still missing in action from the Korean conflict. Students can research how families have coped with the unknown fate of their loved ones, or how DNA testing has helped recovery efforts.

• 1 The Asia-Pacific Journal: Neglected Questions on the “Forgotten War”: South Korea and the United States on the Eve of the Korean War

About the Author

Scott Neuffer is an award-winning journalist and writer who lives in Nevada. He holds a bachelor's degree in English and spent five years as an education and business reporter for Sierra Nevada Media Group. His first collection of short stories, "Scars of the New Order," was published in 2014.

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The Korean War

• ❖ North Korea invaded South Korea on 25th June, 1950.
• ❖ A UN army, made up mostly of American military and led by General Douglas MacArthur , arrived in Korea in September 1950 to push back against the North Korean invasion .
• ❖ In October 1950, UN forces advanced into North Korean territory.
• ❖ On 25th October, China entered the war. Together with the North Korean army, they pushed the UN forces back below the 38th parallel. This resulted in a stalemate for over two years.
• ❖ After peace talks on 27th July, 1953, the UN, China and North Korea signed a peace treaty.
• ❖ The history of Korea was shaped by many wars over who would control it. Both China and Japan ruled the nation for significant periods of time.
• ❖ Between 1910 and 1945, Korea was controlled by Japan. This changed at the end of the Second World War .
• ❖ At the end of the Second World War , the Japanese in the north surrendered to the USSR , and those in the south to the USA.
• ❖ The country was divided into two separate zones along the 38th parallel, a circle of latitude that runs across the middle of Korea.
• ❖ The division of Korea was supposed to be temporary. The aim was for it to be a united and independent country. The United Nations was to organise elections that would achieve this.
• ❖ Instead of free elections , the Soviets in North Korea enabled Korean communist Kim II-Sung to take control of the nation without being elected.
• ❖ There was an election in US-controlled South Korea, and USA supporter and capitalist figure Syngman Rhee became its leader.
• ❖ At this point, North and South Korea became two different nations. The USSR zone in the north became the People's Republic of Korea, and the US zone in the south became the Republic of Korea.
• ❖ While the leaders in both North and South Korea were nationalists and wanted a united country after the war, they wanted the nation to be led by different ideologies - capitalism in the south and communism in the north.
• ❖ Due to the attitude of superiority from both sides there were a number of clashes on the border between North and South Korea.
• ❖ Kim II-Sung , the leader of North Korea, visited Stalin in 1949 to ask for his support in an invasion of South Korea. He felt this would be welcome in the south as an effort to reunite the two nations.
• ❖ Stalin did not think it was the right time as he did not want a fight against US troops still stationed in South Korea.
• ❖ In 1950, Stalin's circumstances had changed. The US troops had left South Korea; communists were in power in China ; and the USSR had its own nuclear weapons and had cracked the secret codes used by the USA to talk to other nations. As a result, Stalin felt any future actions in Korea would not meet American opposition.
• ❖ Stalin began sending tanks, artillery and aircraft to North Korea and gave the go-ahead for an invasion of the south.
• ❖ Stalin stated USSR soldiers would not be directly involved, and if further supplies were needed North Korea should ask China .
• ❖ President Truman was concerned communism was spreading in Asia.
• ❖ China's fall to communism in 1949 heightened this fear.
• ❖ Truman was also concerned about Stalin's use of Cominform to encourage countries to turn to communism.
• ❖ United Nations troops, mainly American and led by US General Douglas MacArthur , were sent to Korea. The North was supported by the Soviet Union .
• ❖ UN forces were able to push North Korea back to the Chinese border, but in late 1950 China joined the war and the UN had to retreat.
• ❖ It demonstrated the USA's commitment to containing communism and led to a tripling of military spending to prevent its spread.
• ❖ To stop the spread of communism in Asia, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation ( SEATO ) was set up in September 1954. Britain, Pakistan, USA, Thailand, France, Australia , the Philippines and New Zealand all joined.
• ❖ The sacking of General MacArthur over his proposal to deploy nuclear bombs against North Korea underlined the USA's caution with regard to using nuclear weapons.
• ❖ The Soviet Union doubled the size of the Red Army, from 2.8 million in 1950 to 5.6 million in 1955.
• ❖ As the war did not escalate further, it showed neither superpower was prepared to engage in direct military confrontation with the other, preferring instead to fight proxy wars.
• ❖ There was a huge human cost - more than 800,000 North and South Korean civilians lost their lives.
• ❖ Approximately 80 per cent of both North and South Korea's industrial buildings were destroyed.
• ❖ Much of Korea's housing and transportation infrastructure was bombed.
• ❖ There was a desperate housing shortage in North Korea. Many people had no option but to live in caves.
• ❖ It was responsible for the huge loss of civilian life in Korea and had used weapons such as napalm , which damaged its reputation.
• ❖ It had increase military spending by a huge amount in order to fight the war.
• ❖ It failed to defeat communism in North Korea.
• ❖ The Korean War cost the USA its relations with China .
• ❖ Between September and October 1950, the UN was successful in pushing North Korean troops back out of South Korea.
• ❖ Between October and November 1950, the UN troops crossed over the 38th parallel and pushed the North Korean troops north in an attempt to defeat the communists and reunite the country.
• ❖ Between November 1950 and January 1951, Chinese forces launched a counteroffensive and pushed the UN troops back past the 38th parallel.
• ❖ The UN counter-attacked between January and July 1951 and retook Seoul.
• ❖ The war then settled into a stalemate which lasted for two years, from July 1951 to July 1953.
• ❖ Some UN troops joined the South Korean forces in Pusan and pushed past the Pusan perimeter.
• ❖ Others, led by General MacArthur, invaded behind the communist lines at Inchon.
• ❖ Seoul was liberated from the communists and North Korean troops were pushed back to the 38th parallel.
• ❖ The UN troops crossed the 38th parallel in an attempt to achieve the UN objective of a 'unified, independent and democratic government' for all of Korea.
• ❖ Pyongyang was captured on 19th October.
• ❖ By November, some American forces had reached the Yalu River on the border with China .
• ❖ As UN troops approached its borders, China feared an invasion of its territory and launched a huge counter-attack of 200,000 soldiers.
• ❖ UN forces were driven south, back over the 38th parallel.
• ❖ Seoul was recaptured by communist forces.
• ❖ The UN forces eventually stabilised around the 37th parallel.
• ❖ Eisenhower had replaced Truman as president and was keen to end the war.
• ❖ Stalin's death in 1953 made China and North Korea less confident.
• ❖ 30,000 American troops were killed.
• ❖ 4,500 UN troops from other countries were killed.
• ❖ Approximately 70,000 South Korean soldiers died.
• ❖ About 500,000 South Korean civilians were killed.
• ❖ An estimated 780,000 North Korean and Chinese soldiers and civilians died in the war.

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If you live to 100, you might as well be happy: what poverty, jail and war have taught author Rhee Kun Hoo

Joy is all around us, according to the bestselling South Korean author. Here’s what he has learned from a long and often hard life

I n nearly 90 years, Rhee Kun Hoo has learned a lot about surviving and thriving. The South Korean psychiatrist turned writer lived through typhoid, war, family bankruptcy and poverty before he was into his teens. In his 20s he was jailed for his role in pro-democracy protests. Throughout his medical career, he helped transform South Korea’s treatment of mental health, while raising four children. He and his wife now live among their children and grandchildren in a communal building in Seoul.

He is at home there when we talk over Zoom, with the help of a translator and an aide who repeats every question to him because his hearing is not what it was. Every so often a cat walks past the window in the garden behind him.

In his 70s, Rhee became a successful writer. His 2013 essay collection, I Want to Have Fun Till the Day I Die, became a bestseller, and Rhee became known for his gentle humour and wisdom. Now, at the age of 89, his 10th book and first English translation has another compelling title – If You Live to 100, You Might As Well Be Happy – which implies quite a lot of choice in the matter.

Rhee believes in choice, and especially accepting the choices you’ve made throughout your life. One way of finding happiness, he writes, is to choose to forgive and to let go of resentment.

Take the 10 months he spent in jail in the early 1960s. “I swore that once I was released, I would never treat any patients who were police officers, prosecutors, military personnel or prison guards, because these people put me, and people I deeply cared about, through so much suffering. I couldn’t really think beyond that hatred because I was in so much pain.” Later, he says, he realised how simplistic he had been. “I wasn’t born with an optimistic mindset,” he says, “but I worked on myself very hard to become more optimistic and see value in people. The world can never be perfect, but it’s good to be hopeful and believe that the world will change for the better.” Everyone “can learn to be more optimistic”.

The Korea that Rhee was born into in 1935 was in the last decade of Japanese colonial rule. He grew up thinking of himself as Japanese, and was a schoolboy during the second world war fought in eastern Asia. He says he received “an extreme wartime education. My life was full of propaganda and I was taught to harbour great hatred for the opponents, without really understanding what was going on.” Rhee was about 10 when Korea was liberated in 1945, and he “went through an identity crisis. I came to learn all the truth behind these years and I had to try very hard to overcome my biases.”

Life was about to get harder – Korea had been divided after the defeat of Japan, and, when Rhee was 14, hostilities broke out between the communist North and the US-backed South. The Korean war was “life-altering,” he says. “After all those years under Japanese colonial rule, South Korea didn’t really enjoy freedom for long.” His father ran a successful food business, and the family were comfortable, but the war bankrupted them and they lost their home, moving from one small run-down apartment to another. His father became ill and died at the age of 49.

Rhee lived in Daegu, one of two major cities that weren’t captured by North Korean soldiers. It became home to many refugees fleeing other provinces, and there was heavy fighting along the nearby Nakdong river, as UN and South Korean forces tried to hold off the Korean People’s Army. Injured soldiers would be taken to Rhee’s school to be treated. “A lot of South Korean soldiers’ corpses were laid out in the square and I would sometimes volunteer to move these bodies,” says Rhee. One uncle was abducted by the North Korean army and other relatives died fighting. In 1951, one of Rhee’s cousins was murdered in the Geochang massacre in which more than 700 unarmed civilians, including children, were accused of being communist sympathisers, rounded up and shot. “A lot of tragedies were going on all around me.”

Almost a decade later, Rhee was a student leader in the pro-democracy movement, protesting against the autocratic rule of Syngman Rhee, South Korea’s first president. “The whole country was going through a lot of political corruption and all the anger people had been feeling about this corruption really exploded at the [1960] April Revolution.” Protests broke out at his university and around the country. “Students were infuriated about the fraud that happened with the election and with the government in general. There were a lot of clashes across the country, and there were armed police officers and military personnel, so the risks were really great. I was aware of these risks at the time but what I felt was anger.”

Newly married and working as a doctor, 24-year-old Rhee was later jailed for his part in the April Revolution. “It was as if the sky folded in on me,” he writes. On his release he discovered that because of his record he wouldn’t be able to study abroad, as he had hoped, or easily find a job. His life was overturned once again a few years later, when people’s political convictions were quashed. With a clean criminal record, Rhee suddenly became eligible for mandatory military service and had to spend three years as an army doctor.

After his time in prison, one place he thought might employ him was a psychiatric hospital – known as an asylum, where treatment was often harsh – that struggled to recruit doctors. It felt like his last resort, he says, but it turned out to be exactly the right place for him. It stretched him as a doctor, and he was able to have a bigger impact, working on large projects and helping to change South Korea’s treatment of mental health. He has learned, looking back over his long life, that whenever he tried to do things he thought he wanted to do, “I met a hurdle or had my wings clipped.” But the paths he was instead forced to take turned out to be even better. “Life is a story you should read till the very last page,” he writes. “No one ever knows what the world has in store for you.”

That said, he has to live with the fact that some of the decisions he made on behalf of his patients turned out to be disastrous, even though he always had their best interests at heart. One patient, a woman whom he believed was safe to be released from psychiatric hospital, took her own life. In older age, he advises repentance: “You should really look back and survey your life for all the unintentional harm you could have caused, all the people you could have unknowingly hurt, and even the sins you glossed over without thinking much of it.” A life without regret or mistakes is not possible, he says.

Rhee knows the value of gratitude but, for all its extreme hardships, his life has also had a fair amount of luck. He met his wife, Lee, as a teenager and they have had a long and happy marriage. As a child, he says boys not much older than him were being drafted into Japan’s junior air force, and many went on to be kamikaze pilots. When Rhee was 14, as the Nakdong river came under attack, local men and boys were conscripted to fight but he was again just too young. Being a pro-democracy activist and dissenter was dangerous, but he survived. Then, as a renowned doctor and professor, Rhee was financially comfortable in later life.

How much of happiness is down to luck? He doesn’t really believe in “the superstitious interpretation” he says. “There is changeable luck, which you can try to improve. I think it’s your ability to adapt to and learn from each situation in life. If you learn from your experience and be better, that means you’re bringing good luck into your life.”

You also need to work out what you actually enjoy and want from life. “If you’re to cross this long river of old age, you need something better than a lifeboat made of other people’s values,” he writes. “You need a sturdy, reliable one made of your own. What do you like, what inspires you, and what gives meaning to your life? Why don’t you find these out first?”

Still, he never expected to become a bestselling writer in his 70s. When he was a young doctor, busy professors would ask him to write medical articles in their place and he was happy to do it. “South Korea still had a lot of bias about mental health patients and there was a lot of stigma,” he says. “I wanted to change that mentality, to educate people, and help them understand mental health patients better.”

Opportunities and experiences often come from connections with other people, he says. “I’ve had a lot of good people in my life who have helped me, everyone who made me who I am today, so that’s what I really believe to be luck – the forces around me that helped shape my life.” None of us stands alone, he says. It’s why being part of a community, volunteering and helping others makes life meaningful, and why social isolation is to be avoided at all costs, especially as we age.

He has had to work at his rich social life, he says. People assume he has “some great magnet-like personality that just attracts people left and right without much effort on my part,” he writes. “The truth is, I’m usually the first one to reach out to people. My secret is to keep it simple and humble. When you overthink and try too hard, you hesitate to take action.”

Rhee believes the older generations, who grew up in a time when we were more socially connected, have a “crucial role” in encouraging this among younger generations. “I don’t think younger generations specifically lack empathy,” he says. “I just think, because the world is so fast-changing, and people have to adapt all the time, they don’t have as much room for expressing empathy as before. And especially because of the pandemic, many things have moved to virtual spaces. There aren’t as many personal and interactive human relationships and I think the younger generation is suffering from that lack. Humans are social animals: we need to avoid emotional isolation at all times and we need to communicate and connect with people.”

Related to that is his other principle: to share. It could be time, help, kindness, money or any number of things. “You can share even if you don’t have much,” he says. “You can just be kind to people you come across in your life. It can be small things.”

We would all find life easier, he thinks, if we had the ability to see things as they are. “Your mind is sometimes very complex, so it tends to simplify things, or blow things out of proportion. But understanding your life for what it is, as well as understanding what you’re going through emotionally, is the first step to living a happy, healthy life.”

For him, this means coming to terms with ageing and uncertainty about the future. When he was younger, it also meant developing a deeper understanding, and acceptance, of his parents. “You should put the words and actions of your parents in context,” he writes, “by lowering your expectations and seeing them for who they are: human. Only then can we finally escape the long shadow cast by our parents.”

We have become too fixated on happiness, he says, when I ask him about the mistakes people make when trying to find it. “The pursuit of happiness is a grand idea but essentially, happiness itself is an illusion. It’s an abstract, subjective notion so we shouldn’t really obsess over what constitutes happiness all the time. Often, people don’t realise the happy moments in their lives and only recognise that happiness in hindsight. We just go about our lives, unaware that we are happy in that moment.”

Rhee says that instead of thinking of happiness as something big, hopefully to achieve at some undetermined point in the future, “you should find joy in your everyday life”. In his book, he underlines living in the moment, and he points out that most lives are made up “in large part, of ordinary days rather than memorable delights or extreme sorrows. If you continue to find fault with ordinary days, you’ll end up spending most of your life discontented and bored. But if you seek out whatever joy and fun you can in those mundane days, your life, as the total sum, will be a lot of fun.”

If You Live To 100, You Might As Well Be Happy by Rhee Kun Hoo (Ebury Publishing, £16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.

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At the Home of BTS, Turmoil Over a Rising K-Pop Star

The firm Hybe has lost hundreds of millions of dollars in market value because of a feud with the creative force behind the band NewJeans.

By Jin Yu Young

Reporting from Seoul

The video had none of the hallmarks of K-pop. No catchy tune, no snazzy outfits, no slick dance routines. Definitely no stars. It was set in an unremarkable auditorium with plain white tables and a large projector screen.

But it included screenshots of chats between two power players in the industry and instantly became the talk of the K-pop world.

It was the live broadcast of a two-hour emotional tell-all delivered last month by Min Hee-Jin, the producer of NewJeans, arguably today’s hottest K-pop act. She had called a news conference to dispute accusations of corporate malfeasance by her employer, Hybe, the K-pop colossus behind BTS.

The unusually public and hostile feud — which has included allegations of plagiarism, chart rigging and shamanism — has led to hundreds of millions of dollars being wiped off Hybe’s market value. And it has cast a cloud over Hybe’s relationship with a rising star, NewJeans, while its biggest act, BTS, is on hiatus.

“It’s about money, it’s about control and also the ownership of an artist,” said Andrew Eungi Kim, referring to NewJeans. A professor at Korea University, Mr. Kim studies the country’s cultural influence, a phenomenon known as hallyu.

The members of BTS, who are all serving in South Korea’s military because of mandatory conscription, are not expected to reunite until next year. As some of them have released solo albums, NewJeans has racked up its share of accolades. In the past year it has topped the Billboard 200, played at Lollapalooza and appeared in commercials for Apple and Coca-Cola.

The creative force behind the act is Ms. Min, who was recruited by Hybe to develop a girl band. Her pushback against Hybe and its founder, Bang Si-hyuk, has resonated widely in South Korea, where corporate life can be punishingly hierarchal .

“She’s like a powerless visionary who is fighting against a giant corporation,” Mr. Kim said.

Started nearly two decades ago as a label called Big Hit, Hybe became the dominant force in K-pop thanks largely to the global success of BTS. It went public in 2020, and a year later, its market value peaked around $12 billion. Since then, its shares have lost about half of their value amid concerns that it would not be able to replicate the profitability of BTS.

Hybe has had success with other groups like Seventeen and Tomorrow X Together. It has also expanded in the United States with deals like the purchase of Ithaca Holdings, whose roster of artists has included Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande. In 2022, it released NewJeans’ first single, “Attention,” without the characteristic fanfare of K-pop debuts. The following year was Hybe’s most lucrative on record, with the company posting annual profit of about 186.6 billion Korean won, or $136 million.

One of the first public indications of the turmoil at Hybe came on April 22, when it announced that it was going to audit Ador, a subsidiary run by Ms. Min. It accused Ms. Min of illegally trying to take control of Ador and asked her to step down. Hybe owns 80 percent of Ador, Ms. Min has an 18 percent stake and the rest is owned by other executives. On April 25, Hybe filed a police complaint against her.

Ms. Min responded publicly the same day with a news conference. Dressed in a green T-shirt with white stripes and a Los Angeles Dodgers hat, she appeared disheveled and broke down several times. She rejected Hybe’s accusations and shared screenshots of chats with Mr. Bang, the firm’s founder, that she suggested were proof of a fraught work environment.

She also said that she had not been compensated fairly and accused Hybe of plagiarizing her work with NewJeans to improve other acts. Hybe has denied her allegations.

To Ms. Min, the dispute was a tug of war between creative and corporate interests.

“All I care about is NewJeans,” Ms. Min said in comments that were livestreamed by the major South Korean broadcasters.

Two days later, a new song by NewJeans, “Bubble Gum ,” was released as scheduled.

In a written response to questions, Ms. Min said, “It is time to reconsider the nature of the entertainment industry.” For K-pop to keep prospering, she added, the industry needs to focus “fundamentally on creators and creation” instead of on money and management.

After Ms. Min’s appearance, rumors involving Hybe artists, chart-rigging and cults circulated the internet. To fans, this sullied the image of their favorite acts.

One group of BTS fans took out an advertisement in local newspapers, criticizing Hybe for airing its dirty laundry. Another protested outside Hybe’s offices.

Ian Liu, a NewJeans fan from Jakarta, Indonesia, had a similar sentiment. “The artists are collateral damage,” he said.

Hybe was also involved in a public feud last year, though that was with outside parties. It was a bidding war for SM Entertainment , another K-pop firm, that was won by Kakao, a South Korean technology giant.

The dispute with Ms. Min, who is the chief executive of Ador, is headed to the courts.

“It’s hard to predict what will happen at this point,” said Lee Gyu Tag, a professor of cultural studies and anthropology at George Mason University’s Korea branch. “In the end, this issue between Hybe and Ador will be a learning opportunity for other agencies to learn how to effectively manage their companies.”

Jin Yu Young reports on South Korea, the Asia Pacific region and global breaking news from Seoul. More about Jin Yu Young