KOREAN WAR 1950-1953
MAJOR COUNTRIES AND GROUPS INVOLVED
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ABOUT THE WAR
The Korean War, sometimes called "The Forgotten War" was a three year fight against Communism. Though it may be forgotten, it has the title of the third deadliest war of the 20th Century with about 1,200,000 soldiers dead at its end. It was originally fought between North and South Korea, but later involved the U.S. and 19 other nations.
During the summer of 1949, South Korea had expanded its army to about 90,000 troops, strength the North matched in early 1950. The North had about 150 Soviet T-34 tanks and a small but effective air force of 70 fighters and 62 light bombers—weapons either left behind when Soviet troops evacuated Korea or bought from the USSR and China in 1949 and 1950. By June 1950 American data showed the two armies at about equal strength, with roughly equal numbers amassed along the 38th parallel. However, this data did not account for the superior battle experience of the North Korean army, especially among the troops who had returned from China.
The fighting began around 3 or 4 AM on
June 25 at the western end of the 38th Parallel. Initial intelligence reports were
indeterminate as to who started the fighting, but by 5:30 AM the formidable 6th
Division of the (North) Korean People's Army (KPA) had joined the fighting in the
west. At roughly the same time, KPA forces in the center of the peninsula dealt a
heavy blow to the ROK Army (ROKA) south of Ch'orwon. The ROKA fell back and two KPA
divisions and an armored brigade crashed through the 38th parallel, beginning a
daunting march toward Seoul, which lay just 50 km (30 mi) to the south.
Just 20 km (12 mi) north of Seoul stood the town of Ŭijongbu, a critical
line of defense for the South maintained by an ROKA division. By the morning of June
26, the division at Ŭijongbu had not committed its forces to battle,
probably because it was waiting to be reinforced by another division from the
interior of South Korea. However, when the reinforcing division finally arrived on
June 26, troops panicked, mutinied, and fled. The reasons for the mutiny were many,
including the relative lack of ROKA firepower, poor training, and ultimately the
unpopularity of the Rhee government—which had nearly been voted out of office in
relatively free elections held a month earlier. The collapse at Ŭijongbu
left a gaping hole in the South Korean defensive line, and North Korean troops poured
through. The ROK government fled Seoul, which was taken on June 28 by a force of
about 37,000 North Korean troops.
The quick and virtually complete collapse of resistance in the South energized the
United States to enter the war in force. Secretary of State Acheson dominated the
decision-making and soon committed American air and ground forces to the fight.
Acheson successfully argued that the United States should increase military aid to
the ROK and provides air cover for the evacuation of Americans from Korea. He also
persuaded the president to place the Seventh Fleet of the U.S. Navy in the Taiwan
Strait. This was needed, he argued, to prevent the Communist Chinese government on
the mainland from invading the island of Taiwan, where the Nationalist Chinese
government had retreated after the mainland fell to the Communists in 1949. The
following day Acheson developed the fundamental strategy for committing American air
and naval power to the Korean War, a strategy approved by Truman that evening but not
yet approved by the United Nations, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Congress.
UN support for the defense of South Korea enabled Truman and Acheson to gain public
support for U.S. intervention. Only two days after the invasion, on June 27, at the
urging of the United States, the UN Security Council voted to repel the North Korean
invasion. The USSR, which could have vetoed the vote, instead boycotted it. The USSR
claimed its boycott was a response to the UN's refusal to admit Communist China;
however, historians have been unconvinced by this argument. On June 25 Stalin
explicitly told the USSR's UN representative not to return to the Security Council,
but Stalin's reasons for this order are not known. Some historians speculate that
Stalin either wanted to draw U.S. forces into a war that would drain the country of
troops and money, or that he hoped to reveal the UN as an American tool.
American ground troops were finally committed in the early morning of June 30, over
the reluctance of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the United States' top military
officers). The Joint Chiefs were concerned about the limits of American power. In
June 1950 the total armed strength of the U.S. Army was 593,167, with an additional
75,370 Marines. North Korea alone was capable of mobilizing perhaps 200,000 combat
soldiers, in addition to the immense reserve of China's People's Liberation Army (PLA).
Nonetheless, Truman and others were motivated by the news that the ROKA had mostly
ceased to fight. Truman did not seek a declaration of war from the U.S. Congress,
relying instead on the United Nations' support.
In July, World War II hero General Douglas MacArthur was placed in command of U.S.
troops in Korea. At first MacArthur wanted only a regimental combat team. Within a
week, however, he cabled Washington that the KPA was "operating under excellent
top level guidance and had demonstrated superior command of strategic and tactical
principles." He consequently asked for a minimum of 30,000 American combat
soldiers in the form of four infantry divisions, three tank battalions, and assorted
artillery.
In the summer of l950 the Korean People's Army pushed southward with dramatic
success, inflicting one humiliating defeat after another on the American forces. An
army that had defeated Germany and Japan in World War II found itself overwhelmed by
what many thought was a hastily assembled, ill-equipped peasant army said to be doing
the bidding of a foreign imperial power. By the end of July 1950, the combined U.S.
and ROK forces numbered 92,000 at the front (47,000 were Americans), compared with
70,000 KPA soldiers at the front. Nonetheless, the KPA advance continued until the
North Korean forces occupied roughly 90 percent of South Korea. Kim Il Sung later
said that his plan had been to win the war in a single month, and by the end of July
he nearly had done so.
In the first week of August the U.S. 1st Marine Brigade arrived and finally
stabilized the U.S. and ROK forces, which by that time guarded only a small area on
the southeastern most part of the peninsula. The right-angled front, known as the
Pusan Perimeter, stretched 80 km (50 mi) from P'ohang on Yogil Gulf to Taegu in the
interior before bending south 110 km (70 mi) to the coastal Chinju-Masan region. The
port city of Pusan lay behind the front on the peninsula's southeastern tip.
The city of Taegu became a symbol of the American determination to halt the KPA's
advance, and many attacks were repelled there. However, it was probably due to a
tactical error at P'ohang, on the northeastern perimeter, that the KPA failed to
occupy Pusan and unify the peninsula. The official American historian of the war, Roy
Appleman, wrote that the "major tactical mistake" of the North Koreans was
not to press their advantage on the eastern coastal road between P'ohang and Pusan.
The KPA division near P'ohang was concerned about covering its flanks and so held its
position. Had it instead moved quickly on P'ohang and then combined with other KPA
divisions, Appleman concluded that Pusan in all likelihood would have fallen. In any
event, the perimeter held for most of August.
At the end of August KPA forces
launched their last major offensive at the perimeter, severely straining the
American-Korean lines for the next two weeks. On August 28 three of the advancing KPA
battalions succeeded in breaching the critical parts of the perimeter. The cities of
P'ohang and Chinju were both lost, with KPA forces advancing along both coasts to
Pusan. Another assault was being launched on the city of Taegu, with enough success
that U.S. commanders evacuated the Eighth Army headquarters from Taegu to Pusan.
Prominent South Koreans began leaving Pusan for the nearby Tsushima Islands of Japan.
Only in mid-September did it become clear that the U.S. and ROK armies would stop the
advance. The decisive factor was numbers. MacArthur succeeded in committing most of
the battle-ready divisions in the entire American armed forces to the Korean
fighting; by September 8 the 82nd Airborne Division was the only combat-trained Army
unit not in Korea. Although many of these units were with the pending amphibious
operation that would land at Inch'on, near Seoul, some 83,000 American soldiers and
another 57,000 South Korean and British troops faced the North Koreans at the Pusan
front. North Korean forces at the front, including guerrillas and a sizable number of
female soldiers, numbered 98,000. The Americans had also accumulated five times as
many tanks as the KPA and vastly superior artillery. They also had complete control
of the air, which they had maintained since the early days of the war. The price for
repelling the assault was steep casualties, totaling 20,000 Americans, with 4,280
dead, by September 15.
In mid-September 1950, MacArthur oversaw an amphibious landing at Inch'on, a port 35
km (22 mi) west of Seoul. The harbor at Inch'on had treacherous tides that could
easily have grounded a flotilla of ships landing at the wrong time. Fortunately,
Admiral Arthur Dewey Struble, the Navy's foremost expert on amphibious landings,
commanded the flotilla. Struble had led the World War II landing at Leyte in the
Philippines, and he had directed naval operations off Omaha Beach during the Normandy
invasion in Europe. These World War II experiences served him well at Inch'on, where
he commanded an enormous fleet of 261 ships through the shifting bays and flats,
depositing 80,000 Marines ashore with very few losses.
Although the Marines landed almost unopposed, they faced a deadly gauntlet before
arriving at Seoul. By the end of September, however, U.S. forces had fought their way
into Seoul and recaptured the capital. For years, many American historians held that
the North Koreans were surprised by the invasion, but new evidence suggests that this
was not the case. The North Koreans simply could not resist the assault and so began
what North Korean historians have called euphemistically "the great strategic
retreat," removing their troops from the South to guard their northern homeland.
Shortly after the Inch'on landing, U.S. forces retrieved a document that contained
Kim Il Sung's thoughts on the fighting in the South. "The original plan was to
end the war in a month," he wrote, but "we could not stamp out four
American divisions." Instead of following orders to march promptly southward,
the North Korean units that had captured Seoul dallied, thereby giving "a
breathing spell" to the Americans. Kim wrote that from the beginning the North's
"primary enemy was the American soldiers," but he acknowledged "we
were taken by surprise when United Nations troops and the American Air Force and Navy
moved in." This suggests that Kim anticipated the involvement of American ground
forces, but not in such size, and not with air and naval units. Perhaps the North
Koreans believed that Soviet air and naval power would either deter or confront their
American counterparts. Or perhaps they simply believed, like the U.S. Joint Chiefs of
Staff, that the vast majority of American battle-ready infantry would not be
transferred from all over the globe to this small peninsula of seeming marginal
importance to U.S. global strategy.
Regardless, by early October 1950 the North had been pushed from South Korea. The war
for control of the South left 111,000 South Koreans killed, 106,000 wounded, and
57,000 missing; 314,000 homes had been destroyed, 244,000 damaged. American
casualties totaled 6,954 dead, 13,659 wounded, and 3,877 missing in action. North
Korean casualty figures are not known.
The U.S.-led forces might have reestablished the 38th parallel as the border between
North and South Korea, ended the war, and declared that the Truman Doctrine's policy
of containing Communism had been achieved. Instead, MacArthur sent troops across the
parallel into North Korea in early October. Historians later faulted MacArthur for
taking this action without Truman's approval, but evidence has since shown that
Truman approved the march north at the end of August, even before the landing at
Inch'on. As the summer progressed, nearly all of Truman's senior advisers decided the
chance had come not only to contain Communism, but to roll it back. Thus, National
Security Council document 81 authorized MacArthur to "roll back" the North
Korean regime if there were no Soviet or Chinese threats to intervene. The document
also instructed MacArthur to use only Korean troops near the Chinese border so as not
to further antagonize China.
In September and October 1950 U.S. intelligence agencies generally concluded that
China would not enter the war. On September 20 the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
noted that there was a slight possibility that Chinese "volunteers" might
enter the fighting, and a month later it noted "a number of reports" that
units from Manchuria (along the Chinese border with Korea) might be sent to North
Korea. Nonetheless, the CIA decided "the odds are that Communist China, like the
USSR, will not openly intervene in North Korea." MacArthur swept confidently
onward. By October 19 UN troops had captured the North Korean capital, P'yongyang,
lying 150 km (90 mi) northwest of the 38th parallel.
Three days earlier, Chinese troops had crossed their border at the Yalu River into
North Korea. They dealt heavy losses to ROK troops and bloodied U.S. forces as well,
then abruptly ceased offensives for three weeks. This incursion by China did not stop
the American march to the Yalu. General Walter Bedell Smith, director of the CIA,
wrote on November 1 that the Chinese "probably genuinely fear an invasion of
Manchuria." He also predicted the Chinese would try to establish a buffer zone
along the border for security "regardless of the increased risk of general
war." However, the CIA still found insufficient evidence throughout November
that China would mount a major offensive.
North Korean and Chinese documents released or declassified in the 1980s and 1990s
tell a different story. China did not enter the war purely to protect its border.
Rather, Mao decided early in the war that should the North Koreans falter, China had
an obligation to help them because many North Koreans had sacrificed their lives
alongside Chinese—in the Chinese revolution that overthrew the imperial government
in 1911 to 1912, in resistance to Japan's decades of occupation, and in the Chinese
civil war of 1946 to 1949. On August 4, 1950, Mao told the Chinese Politburo (the
highest decision-making body of the Chinese Communist Party) that he intended to send
troops to Korea "in the name of a volunteer army" should the Americans
reverse the tide of battle. The day after UN troops crossed the 38th parallel, Mao
informed Stalin of his decision to invade. In other words, it was not the approach of
American troops on the Chinese border that prompted China's attack; it was the
American strategy to roll back North Korean Communism.
The North Koreans and Chinese apparently waited to attack UN forces until they were
well inside North Korea in order to stretch the UN supply lines and gain time for a
dramatic reversal on the battlefield. On November 24 MacArthur launched a general
offensive all along the northern front, which was nearing the Yalu. He described it
as a "massive compression and envelopment," a pincer movement to trap the
remaining KPA forces that were backed into the mountainous northern part of the
peninsula. The offensive rolled forward for three days against little or no
resistance, with ROK units succeeding in entering the important city of Ch'ongjin on
the upper east coast, 70 km (45 mi) short of China. Lost amid the victory were
reports from U.S. reconnaissance pilots that long columns of enemy troops were
"swarming all over the countryside."
Chinese and North Korean troops began
strong counterattacks on November 27, 1950, dealing devastating blows to U.S. and ROK
troops. The U.S. 1st Marine Division was pinned down at the Changjin Reservoir, the
ROK II Corps collapsed, and within two days a general withdrawal ensued. By December
6, Communist forces occupied P'yongyang, and the next day the front was only 32 km
(20 mi) above the 38th parallel. A little more than two weeks after the Sino-Korean
offensive began, North Korea was cleared of enemy troops. Chinese troops in North
Korea numbered approximately 200,000. On New Year's Eve Chinese and North Korean
troops launched another major offensive, once again capturing Seoul. Secretary of
State Acheson later called this the worst American defeat since the Battle of Bull
Run during the American Civil War (1861-1865).
Under the field command of U.S. Lieutenant General Matthew Ridgway, UN troops finally
stiffened their defenses south of Seoul in early 1951. Bloody weeks of fighting
ensued as UN troops fought northward to the Han River, opposite the capital. Several
more weeks passed before Seoul changed hands again, and in early April, Ridgway's
forces again crossed the 38th parallel. By then fighting had stabilized more or less
along what later became the Korean demilitarized zone, with UN forces in occupation
north of the parallel on the eastern side, and Sino-North Korean forces occupying
swatches of land south of the parallel on the western side.
As early as November 30, 1950, Truman said the United States might use any weapon in
its arsenal to hold back the Chinese, an oblique reference to the atomic bomb. This
threat apparently deeply worried Stalin. According to a high official who served at
the time in the KGB (the Soviet intelligence agency), Stalin feared that global war
would result from the American defeat in northern Korea and favored letting the
United States occupy all of Korea. "So what?" Stalin is reported to have
said. "Let the United States of America be our neighbors in the Far East. ... We
are not ready to fight." China, however, held a different view, apparently
willing to fight at least to the middle of the Korea Peninsula, though not further if
the consequence might be a third world war.
The U.S. government seriously considered using nuclear weapons in Korea in early
1951. The immediate threat was the USSR's deployment of 13 air divisions to East
Asia, including 200 bombers that could strike not just Korea but also American bases
in Japan; and China's deployment of massive new forces near the Korean border. On
March 10, 1951, MacArthur asked Truman for a "D-Day atomic
capability"—the ability to launch a massive nuclear assault. Truman complied,
ordering the Air Force to refurbish the atomic bomb loading pits at Okinawa, Japan,
which were used during World War II. Atomic bombs were then carried to Okinawa
unassembled and put together at the base, lacking only the essential nuclear cores.
On April 5, the Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered immediate atomic retaliation against
Soviet and Chinese bases in Manchuria if large numbers of new troops entered the war.
Also on April 5, Gordon Dean, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC),
arranged for the transfer of nine nuclear capsules held by the AEC in the United
States to the Air Force bomb group that would carry the weapons. Truman approved the
transfer as well as orders outlining their use the next day.
The president also used this extraordinary crisis to get the Joint Chiefs of Staff to
approve MacArthur's removal. For some time, MacArthur had chafed against restrictions
placed on him by Truman. MacArthur sought to expand the war to Mainland China and
ignored Truman's orders to use only Korean troops near the Chinese border. On April
11, 1951, Truman asked for MacArthur's resignation. Most observers assumed Truman
wanted a more subordinate commander. Although this observation was partly true, U.S.
government documents later made clear that Truman wanted a reliable commander in the
field should Washington decide to use nuclear weapons. Truman, in short, was not sure
he could trust MacArthur to use nuclear weapons as ordered.
By early summer 1951 the war had settled into the pattern it would follow for the
next two years: bloody fighting along the 38th parallel, most of it in trench warfare
reminiscent of World War I (1914-1918), and tortuous peace negotiations. During this
time the UN forces engaged mainly in a series of probing actions known as the active
defense. Periods of heavy fighting continued, however, both on the ground and in the
air. Although the Communists could not sustain another major offensive, their
well-entrenched forces made even the UN's active defense strategy very costly. Some
of the most desperate battles took place on the hills called Old Baldy, Capital, Pork
Chop, T-Bone, and Heartbreak Ridge. On June 23, 1951, the USSR's representative to
the UN, Adam Malik, proposed that the warring parties begin discussions for a
cease-fire. Truman agreed, and the ancient Korean capital of Kaesong, located just
south of the 38th parallel, was chosen as a meeting place. Truce talks began on July
10, led initially by U.S. Vice Admiral C. Turner Joy for the UN side, and
Lieutenant-General Nam Il of North Korea. The talks dragged on interminably, with
several suspensions and a removal of the truce site to the village of P'anmunjom,
just southeast of Kaesong.
There were months of haggling over how to properly and fairly mark each side's
military lines, but the main issue that prolonged the negotiations was the
disposition of the many prisoners of war (POWs) on both sides. The North Koreans had
maltreated many American and allied POWs, harshly depriving them and subjecting many
to political thought reform that was decried as "brainwashing" in the
United States. In the South's POW camps, a virtual war ensued over repatriation.
About one-third of North Korean POWs and a much larger percentage of Chinese POWs did
not want to return to Communist control, prompting struggles among pro-Communists and
anti-Communists. Meanwhile South Korea refused to sign any armistice that would keep
Korea divided, and the South's Syngman Rhee sought to hinder the talks by abruptly
releasing thousands of North Korean POWs who did not want to return home. The United
States decided Rhee could not be trusted and developed plans to remove him in a coup
d'état. The coup was never carried out.
The POW issue was finally settled on June 8, 1953. The Communists agreed to the
placement of POWs who refused repatriation under the control of a neutral commission
of nations for three months; at the end of this period those who still refused
repatriation would be set free. Two final and costly Communist offensives in June and
July 1953 sought to gain more ground but failed, and the U.S. Air Force for the first
time destroyed huge irrigation dams that had provided water for 75 percent of the
North's food production. Although not widely reported, hundreds of square miles of
farmland were inundated.
On July 27, 1953, the UN, North Korea, and China signed an armistice
agreement—South Korea refused to sign—and the fighting ended. The armistice
called for a buffer zone 4 km (2.5 mi) wide across the middle of Korea, from which
troops and weapons were supposed to be withdrawn. This "demilitarized zone"
was in fact heavily fortified; as of the late 1990s, more than 1 million soldiers
confronted each other along the zone. With no peace treaty signed, the two Koreas
remained technically still at war; only the armistice agreement and demilitarized
zone kept a tenuous peace.