Korean War

The Korean War has been called America’s “forgotten war”, neglected on the timeline between the twin cataclysms of World War II and Vietnam. The stage for war was set back in the late summer of 1945, when the White House and the Kremlin agreed on a demarcation line (38° N latitude) dividing Korea into two halves, with the Communist Russians controlling the North and the United States acting as policeman for the Republic in the South. Following this agreement, the superpowers ceased to concern themselves much with the country of Korea. In 1948 and 1949 both Russia and America withdrew the majority of their forces from Korea.

On June 25, 1950, Kim Il Sung, the leader of Communist North Korea, sent troops of the North Korea People’s Army across the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea, heading toward its capital, Seoul. According to historian David Halberstam, “South Korea became important only after the North Korean Communists struck in the night; its value was psychological rather than strategic—the enemy had crossed a border.”

The Cold War

The countries of the world were laid out like a gameboard. It was the U.S. way of life vs. the U.S.S.R. way of life. Free countries vs. communist countries. The American idea was, if South Korea fell to the Communists, a chain reaction might result leading to one country after another succumbing to Stalin. The U.S. had to act to keep the first domino from toppling. The bloody battle in the small country of South Korea would be a microcosm of the superpowers’ struggle for dominance of the entire world. It was a real war, with South Koreans fighting the invaders to remain sovereign and free; and it was a symbolic one, World Democracy vs. World Communism. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. would fight it out indirectly—Capitalism vs. Communism would battle for supremacy in Korea.

Early Movements

General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of American Forces in the Far East, and seventy years old at the time, was ordered to sort out the problem. MacArthur, headquartered in Toyko, flew to South Korea on June 27. The Eighth U.S. Army in Japan was on the way by June 30. The Americans would help defend South Korea from the Communist invaders. President Truman deemed America’s effort a “police action”. It would be the first time in the post-World War II environment that America would assume the role of World Cop.

In Washington, D.C. on July 19, President Truman asked Congress to approve an emergency defence appropriation of $11 billion. Truman, like Roosevelt before him in 1940, wanted 50,000 war planes built a year. Congress appropriated $8 billion for aircraft production for 1951.

On September 15, 1950, General MacArthur led a victorious assault on the port of Inchon on the west coast of South Korea, just west of the capital city. This victory finally broke the momentum of the North, which had maintained the upper hand in combat during July and August. The Americans routed the enemy then marched east into Seoul, subduing the invaders by September 27. The Americans had the North Koreans on the run. The war looked set to come to a quick end as the Communists were retreating back above the 38th parallel. But President Truman made a fateful decision which led to the war dragging on for two more years. He gave MacArthur orders to give chase. Chairman Mao of Communist China had warned the U.S. not to travel north of the 38th parallel, yet the American forces invaded North Korea anyway on October 7. Subsequently Chairman Mao sent Chinese troops into North Korea to help defend its Communist ally against the invading Westerners. By the end of November 300,000 Chinese troops were in combat. The Americans, in tandem with UN Forces, saw heavy fighting over the next few months. Back in America, more than a few government officials as well as journalists wondered if this was the beginning of World War III. On December 16, 1950, President Truman declared a National Emergency, warning the American people, “The increasing menace of the forces of communist aggression requires that the national defense of the United States be strengthened as quickly as possible.”

The Korean War wasn’t to be the onset of Armageddon, but it was a grim and dirty war, a prototype of the Vietnam War experience in its years of “stalemate” fighting in a rugged landscape strange to Americans.

Stalemate

The Korean War dragged on. General MacArthur was recalled back to Washington, D.C. on April 11, 1951. General Matthew B. Ridgway assumed command of the UN forces in the Far East and General James A. Van Fleet of the Eighth Army in Korea. America was destined for two more years of scattershot combat and futile negotiations. U.S. defense budget for 1951 was $48.3 billion; for 1952, $62.2 billion; for 1953, $53.2 billion. Before the war came to a close President Truman would reach the end of his first elected term as President and chose not to run again. During his farewell radio address to the American people on January 15, 1953, Truman said this:

In Korea our men are fighting as valiantly as Americans have ever fought—because they know they are fighting in the same cause of freedom in which Americans have stood ever since the beginning of the Republic. . . . Now, once in a while I get a letter from some impatient person asking, Why don’t we get it over with? Why don’t we issue an ultimatum—make all-out war, drop the atomic bomb? For most Americans, the answer is quite simple: we are not made that way. We are a moral people. Peace is our goal, with justice and freedom.

The Korean War dragged on until an armistice was signed between North Korea, the United States, and China on July 27, 1953. According to the official count, 33,629 American soldiers had been killed in action on the battlefield in the Korean War, mostly by Chinese—not North Korean—divisions. 110,000 thousand Americans were wounded or missing-in-action. The UN forces lost 60,371. The U.S. Army estimate of enemy killed exceeded one million, the majority Chinese troops. The war-torn landscape of the Korean peninsula, after three years of ground fighting and saturation bombardment by American air power, was in ruins.

Postscript

Following the ending of the Korean War the Cold War remained at an intense boil. Joseph Stalin had died on March 5, 1953 but the Soviet Union, now under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, remained just as fearsome to the American people.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, formerly Allied Commander in Chief in Europe during World War II; and his vice president, Richard Nixon, both distrusted the Communists as much as President Ronald Reagan would in the 1980s, and the Cold War haunted the world political scene of the 1950s. One crisis after another threatened world stability: Chinese Communist aggression in the Formosa Straits in 1954 and 1958, Egypt’s seizure of the Suez Canal in 1956, unrest in Jordan and Syria in 1957, the Soviet Union shooting America’s U-2 spy plane out of its airspace in 1960. The two nuclear powers lived in constant fear and dread of one another and competed in a dangerous arms race to maintain a global balance of power. That their arsenals contained enough firepower to turn the surface of the earth into a sterile moonscape led the two superpowers by mutual fear to maintain an inhibition against the deployment of atomic bombs. The militaries of both countries were still being fortified by men and matériel for ground-based operations. The American government spent more than $50 billion in 1953 to build up its military services. The Department of the Air Force received $15 billion of that sum that year. The defense industry was making a killing in order to preserve the peace.