Korean War

• 1. Introduction

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  At 4:40 in the morning on the 25th of June 1950, the Korean People's Army crossed the 38th parallel behind a wall of artillery fire. Within an hour, troops were striking all along that line. Within three hours, individual units had pushed three to five kilometers into South Korean territory. The Korean War had begun, though North Korea declared no war and called its assault Operation Pokpung. The fighting would last until the 27th of July 1953. It would kill around one million soldiers and somewhere between 1.5 million and 3 million civilians, making it one of the deadliest conflicts of the Cold War for non-combatants. How did a peninsula split by an invisible line drawn in a Washington office become the first great proxy war of the Cold War? Why did the United Nations Security Council authorize force for the first time under Chapter VII of its Charter? And why, more than seventy years on, has no peace treaty ever been signed?

• 2. An Invisible Line

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  On the 11th of August 1945, two American colonels named Dean Rusk and Charles H. Bonesteel III sat in Washington and chose a line across a former Japanese colony. They picked the 38th Parallel to divide Korea into two occupation zones, Soviet to the north and American to the south. Korea had been ruled by the Empire of Japan from 1910 to 1945, a colonial period of 35 years. Rusk later admitted the line ran further north than US forces could realistically reach if the Soviets disagreed. He explained the choice plainly. The Americans felt it important to include the capital of Korea inside their area of responsibility. Joseph Stalin honored the arrangement at first. On the 16th of August the Red Army halted at the 38th parallel for three weeks, waiting for US forces to arrive. Political disagreement soon hardened the line into a border. The two zones formed rival governments in 1948, each claiming to be the only legitimate ruler of all Korea. The Republic of Korea was established on the 15th of August 1948, with Syngman Rhee elected president and based in Seoul. In the north, the Soviets backed a communist government under Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang. Both leaders looked across the parallel and saw unfinished business.

• 3. Stalin Says Yes

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  Kim Il Sung began pressing Stalin for an invasion in March 1949, traveling to Moscow to make his case. He believed widespread uprisings had weakened the South Korean military, and that much of the southern population would welcome his troops. At first Stalin refused. Soviet ambassador Terentii Shtykov told Kim in August 1949 that an outright invasion was out of the question unless South Korea attacked first. By 1950 Stalin's thinking shifted. Mao Zedong's forces had won the Chinese Civil War, US troops had withdrawn from Korea, and the Soviets had detonated their first nuclear bomb, breaking the American monopoly. Soviet intelligence had cracked the codes the US used with its Moscow embassy, and the dispatches convinced Stalin that Korea did not matter enough to Washington to risk a nuclear confrontation. On the 30th of January 1950 Stalin telegraphed Shtykov that any invasion would need extensive preparations and should be organized without too big a risk. Kim spent almost a month in the Soviet Union, from the 30th of March to the 25th of April, finalizing the plans. Stalin set one condition. Mao had to agree to send reinforcements if needed, and Soviet forces would never openly enter combat, to avoid direct war with the United States. The invasion date was fixed on the 15th of June, and on the 24th, division commanders received their orders. The Korean People's Army planned to defeat the South in twenty-two to twenty-seven days.

• 4. A Council Without Russia

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  On the 25th of June 1950 the United Nations Security Council found that the North Korean invasion was a breach of the peace under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. There was a decisive absence in the room. The Soviet Union, a veto-wielding power, had been boycotting the Security Council since January 1950 in protest at Taiwan holding China's permanent seat. With no Soviet representative present to vote against it, the resolution passed. On the 27th of June the Council adopted Resolution 83, recommending that member states give military assistance to South Korea. President Harry S. Truman compared the invasion to Adolf Hitler's aggressions in the 1930s and concluded the mistake of appeasement must not be repeated. He never asked Congress to declare war. Instead he called the deployment a police action, a legal pretext for sending US troops without congressional authority. On the 7th of July the Council adopted Resolution 84, setting up a Unified Command authorized to fly the blue flag of the UN. The coalition eventually comprised 21 countries, with the United States providing around 90 percent of the military personnel. Truman believed that if South Korea fell, communist leaders would be emboldened to override nations closer to American shores.

• 5. An Army Of Scraps

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  Korea was not included in the strategic Asian Defense Perimeter that US Secretary of State Dean Acheson had outlined. When the attack came, the Truman administration was unprepared. Truman called for a naval blockade of North Korea and was shocked to learn the US Navy no longer had the warships to impose one except on paper. Army officials, desperate for weapons, recovered Sherman tanks from Pacific War battlefields and reconditioned them. At Fort Knox, ordnance officers pulled M26 Pershing tanks down from display pedestals to equip the hastily formed 70th Tank Battalion. The Air Force took propeller-driven F-51 aircraft out of storage and from Air National Guard squadrons and rushed them to the front. One Navy helicopter pilot remembered fixing damaged rotor blades with masking tape for lack of spare parts. The numbers tell the imbalance. By mid-1950 North Korean forces numbered between 150,000 and 200,000 troops, with 274 T-34-85 tanks and a real air force. As of the 25th of June the South had 98,000 soldiers, no tanks at all, and an air force of just 22 planes, twelve liaison aircraft and ten advanced trainers. The South had requested tanks from the US military and been denied. Only 200 to 300 US troops were in Korea, while large garrisons sat in nearby Japan.

• 6. The Bridge And The Massacres

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  On the 28th of June 1950 the Republic of Korea Army blew up the Hangang Bridge across the Han River, hoping to stop the advancing Korean People's Army. The bridge was detonated while 4,000 refugees were crossing it, and hundreds were killed. The explosion trapped many South Korean units north of the river. Seoul fell that same day. Within five days, an army of 95,000 troops on the 25th of June had shrunk to fewer than 22,000, as soldiers retreated south or defected to the north. On the 28th of June Rhee ordered the massacre of suspected political opponents inside his own country. The war's cruelty was not confined to one side. On the 26th of July 1950 US military aircraft strafed and bombed refugees gathered on railway tracks near Joo Gok Ri and Im Gae Ri. Survivors scrambled into twin tunnels beneath the tracks, where gunfire riddled the entrances for at least a day. Estimates put the dead at 50 to 150 on the tracks and another 60 to 300 in the tunnels. This is the No Gun Ri massacre, hidden from the American public until Associated Press journalists revealed it seventy years later and won a Pulitzer Prize for their work. By September, UN forces were hemmed into the southeast corner of the peninsula, holding a 230-kilometer perimeter along the Nakdong River that enclosed about 10 percent of Korea, near the port of Pusan.

• 7. The Tide Turns And Returns

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  On the 15th of September 1950 an amphibious force landed at Incheon, well over a hundred miles behind the Korean People's Army lines. General Douglas MacArthur had pushed the plan past the opposition of the Pentagon. His X Corps comprised 40,000 troops and around 8,600 South Korean soldiers, and they faced few defenders. The bombardment that cleared the way also destroyed most of Incheon. Seoul was recaptured on the 25th of September, and the trapped KPA in the south disintegrated. Only 25,000 to 30,000 of its soldiers reached the northern lines. UN forces drove north, captured Pyongyang on the 19th of October, and held 135,000 KPA prisoners by month's end. Then China answered. After secretly crossing the Yalu River on the 19th of October, the Chinese People's Volunteer Army launched its First Phase Offensive on the 25th. Their march discipline defeated UN aerial reconnaissance. The troops marched dark to dark under aerial camouflage, and officers had orders to shoot security violators. One three-division army covered 286 miles from An-tung, Manchuria, to the combat zone in 19 days. Their night attacks came with loud trumpets and gongs that coordinated movement and disoriented UN troops who had never faced the tactic. The Chinese and North Koreans captured Seoul for the second time on the 4th of January 1951. A UN counter-offensive took it back two months later, the fourth and final conquest of the city in a single year. Seoul's pre-war population of 1.5 million had fallen to 200,000, with people suffering food shortages.

• 8. A Desert And A Frozen Line

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  On the 5th of November 1950 twenty-one B-29 Superfortress bombers dropped 170 tons of incendiary bombs on the North Korean town of Kanggye, destroying 65 percent of its built-up area. So began a bombing campaign that lasted until the armistice in July 1953. MacArthur ordered the Air Force to destroy every means of communication, every installation, every factory, city and village north of Pyongyang. General Mark W. Clark saw the heavy bombing of towns as a way of undermining the morale of the North Korean people and their ability to wage war. The figures are staggering. The United States dropped 635,000 tons of bombs in Korea, not counting 32,557 tons of napalm, more than the 503,000 tons dropped in the entire Pacific theater of World War II. At least half of eighteen of the North's twenty-two major cities were obliterated. Sinanju was destroyed 100 percent, Sariwon 90 percent, Hamhung 80 percent, Pyongyang 75 percent. North Korea became one of the most heavily bombed countries in history. Combat ended on the 27th of July 1953 with the signing of the Korean Armistice Agreement. It allowed the exchange of prisoners and created a demilitarized zone four kilometers wide along the frontline, with a Joint Security Area at Panmunjom. No peace treaty was ever signed. The conflict remains frozen, flaring occasionally, as in the DMZ Conflict of 1966 to 1969. In South Korea the war is still called the 625 War, after the date it began, while in the English-speaking world it has often been called the Forgotten War.