Victory Lost | The Korean War
The cold froze rifles in their hands, turned oil into sludge, and stiffened fingers until pulling a trigger became an exercise in willpower. Temperatures plunged to thirty degrees below zero along North Korea’s Chosin Reservoir. Men slept in shallow foxholes they’d hacked out of frozen ground and ate C-rations turned to ice while wrapping themselves in as many layers as they could find. Even the act of speaking became difficult as their breath crystallized in the air. Decades later, the veterans of America’s X Corps recalled the weather more than anything else.
While Americans celebrated Thanksgiving, soldiers of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army moved into position around the Chosin Reservoir. The attack came on the night of November 27, 1950, and its speed caught the X Corps completely by surprise. Whole units were cut off in the battle’s first hour, and the road south—their only lifeline—came under constant artillery fire. Amidst the hail of falling shells, Colonel Lewis “Chesty” Puller of the First Marine Regiment, USMC, cabled to his superiors: “We’ve been looking for the enemy for some time now. We’ve finally found him. We’re surrounded. That simplifies things.” His words captured the grim reality the Americans faced. They could not break through to open ground and fight on even terrain, and no relieving forces could reach the enemy’s flanks. Survival depended on discipline in the ranks, coordination of movements, and the ability to fight in every direction at once.
And that is precisely what happened. American and South Korean units moved carefully along mountain roads under heavy bombardment. Rear guards fought delaying actions to protect the engineers, who cleared obstacles and repaired bridges under fire. Medics cared for the wounded as best they could and tried to stave off frostbite before it turned to gangrene. Amidst the storm of steel raining down on them, the X Corps’ columns moved step by step and mile by mile, turning what might have been a disorganized collapse into an orderly withdrawal. In the end, both sides claimed victory after the sixteen-day battle; the Chinese because they had forced the enemy back and won the field, and the Americans because most of the X Corps was still intact as a fighting unit.
Korea had been under Japanese occupation since the end of the previous century, and the empire had ruthlessly suppressed Korean identity, language, and culture. When Japan lost the Second World War, the Allies occupied the region temporarily and divided the peninsula. North of the 38th parallel, the Soviet Union installed the revolutionary despot Kim Il-Sung, who turned his nation into a tyrannical state, enacted brutal land reform policies that caused mass starvation, and purged his enemies from North Korean society in perfect alignment with the wishes of his master in Moscow, Joseph Stalin. In the South, the anticommunist and Korean nationalist Rhee Syngman created a government that was democratic on paper, though he also cracked down on dissenters and manipulated elections to preserve his own power. But American President Harry Truman believed that backing Rhee was vital to containing the virus of communism spreading across the world as the 20th century reached its midpoint.
The plan for Korea was relatively simple: both regimes would have five years to reconstruct their nations before a peninsula-wide vote to determine who would rule a united Korea: Kim or Rhee. In this case, Rhee had all the advantages—South Korea became prosperous very quickly thanks to American loans, while the North fell into the familiar pattern of corruption and brutality under its communist rulers. As the 1950 plebiscite approached, Kim saw his power threatened and sought permission from the Soviets to resolve the unity question by force. Stalin agreed, and North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel on June 25, 1950.
Busan
The speed of the communist assault on the South was devastating. North Korean units advanced in coordinated columns using Soviet-built T-34 tanks, and South Korean forces fell apart in every early battle. Kim’s forces used the German model of blitzkrieg by supporting their armor with mobile infantry, who exploited breakthroughs and mopped up those few South Korean units who resisted. The South’s communication lines collapsed, its armies were encircled or forced to retreat, and the capital city of Seoul fell only three days into the war. It was an utter catastrophe.
Despite warnings that an attack was coming, American forces in East Asia were woefully unprepared. General Douglas MacArthur, hero of the Pacific War who now commanded the occupation forces in Japan, deployed what units he could. But American soldiers lacked heavy weapons and combat training—few were veterans of the global conflict five years earlier. The North Koreans routed the Americans in the first engagement at Osan because US antitank rockets could not penetrate the T-34 tank’s armor, and the lines broke after only a couple hours.
Across the world in New York City, the United Nations Security Council voted to create a unified command in South Korea and place General MacArthur at its head. This would be the first test of whether the peacekeeping body could do its job. President Harry Truman was firm in his resolve to contain communism by force in Korea and ordered full mobilization of the US Armed Forces. And in Korea, the situation grew desperate in the weeks that followed Seoul’s fall. Refugees crowded the narrow roads south toward the port of Busan, which slowed South Korean and American moves to challenge the advancing North. Engineers blew up bridges to slow the enemy and often trapped friendly units on the wrong side.
But even in retreat, new patterns emerged and defined the conflict. Air power, particularly close-in support, disrupted North Korean supply lines as it had done in the war against Germany and Japan. The US Navy controlled the waters off the peninsula and provided both artillery support and protection for supply convoys entering Busan harbor. The fighting was relentless as Kim drove his soldiers forward. Busan’s defenses used natural barriers like rivers and hills to channel the enemy into narrow attack lanes covered by massive artillery batteries. Amidst repeated North Korean assaults, especially along the Naktong River, the balance began to shift as UN forces coordinated their moves and hardened their defenses.
New technologies came to the battlefield in Korea. Jet aircraft like the American F-86 Sabre and Soviet-made MiG-15 engaged in dogfights high above troops on the ground and destroyed enemy targets with lightning speed. And helicopters, still relatively new, evacuated wounded soldiers to Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals (MASH units) inside the Busan perimeter. Though war became ever-faster in the 20th century, in some ways it was now more survivable as doctors tended their patients only hours after they’d been injured.
Incheon
General MacArthur understood Winston Churchill’s maxim that “wars are not won by evacuations.” His UN command could hold Busan indefinitely, but he intended to turn the tide with a counterstroke that he thought would elevate him to the highest ranks of battlefield commanders in military history. His ambitious plan centered on Incheon, the port closest to South Korea’s fallen capital. The UN’s X Corps would move by sea for an amphibious descent on the city far from the main body of North Korea’s army, which still pressed on the Busan perimeter. His advisors urged caution and pointed out that local tides were too strong and might strand landing craft on the beaches, as well as the narrow approaches to Incheon that would limit the Navy’s maneuverability. But MacArthur was convinced that surprise would outweigh these disadvantages, and the troops boarded ships for the short sea voyage.
The landings began on September 15th, with warships pounding the North Korean defenses and US Marines securing key beaches for the incoming armor. Within days, the X Corps had secured Incheon and were forming up to liberate Seoul in one of the most successful military operations in American history. Kim Il-Sung’s military command panicked and ordered an immediate counterassault, pulling units away from Busan and triggering a UN breakout. The North’s entire front then collapsed in disarray and raced for home. General MacArthur now had a decision to make: he had restored South Korea and contained communism, so should he keep going? Though politicians in Washington urged a negotiated end to the war, the general believed he had a responsibility to end the North Korean threat once and for all.
MacArthur’s forces crossed the 38th parallel in late September and captured the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, on October 19th. The rugged terrain divided the UN forces as they plowed through shattered North Korean units and raced to the Yalu River and the Chinese border. Intelligence reports reached MacArthur’s headquarters that China was moving troops to the river, but he dismissed these messages. The general was convinced that Mao Tse Tung’s forces lacked the logistical ability to intervene in Korea and that US air power would deter the Chinese.
In Beijing, Chairman Mao grew concerned that the Americans might invade the People’s Republic and overthrow his regime. He ordered his army to cross the Yalu River in late October. When Joseph Stalin learned of these moves, he authorized Soviet pilots to enter the war to support Chinese ground forces. The first engagements drew little comment from MacArthur, though he reinforced the units driving for the Yalu throughout early November. He remained confident that his men would be home by Christmas.
Chosin
The American 2nd Infantry Division took heavy losses on the UN’s right flank on November 25, 1950; two days later, the Chinese assaulted the X Corps at the Chosin Reservoir. Allied forces were taking serious casualties as over a million People’s Liberation Army soldiers poured across the Yalu River, and the UN had to pull back by land and sea. With his forces now halted or in retreat, MacArthur considered what to do. He and President Truman thought about abandoning Korea entirely, but this would only encourage communist expansion elsewhere in the world. MacArthur also had another weapon in his hands, one that had not been used in battle for five years.
At a November 30th press conference, while Chesty Puller and the men of the X Corps were fighting in the icy weather at Chosin Reservoir, President Truman told a reporter that “the military commander in the field will have the charge of the use of the weapons, as he always has.” He was referring to nuclear bombs, and his words contradicted the principle enshrined in the 1946 Atomic Energy Act that placed their use in the hands of civilian leaders rather than the military. The White House clarified the president’s remark, stating that only he had the authority to use atomic weapons, but the comment touched off a serious controversy that defined the Korean War’s course.
Historians still debate whether or not General MacArthur would have actually used nuclear bombs in Korea, and declassified documents published since the war have not provided much clarity. But what is beyond question is how MacArthur reacted to what he believed were limits on his ability to win the war. When asked by a reporter about the Pentagon forbidding him to strike targets in China, the general responded that they were “an enormous handicap, unprecedented in military history.” This remark started the break in relations between MacArthur and Truman. The general expanded on this theme after the war in an interview published posthumously: “I could have won the war in Korea in a maximum of ten days…I would have dropped between thirty and fifty atomic bombs on [Chinese] airbases and other depots.” Had he done this, that likely would have triggered a third world war.
On the battlefield, the Chinese and revived North Koreans pushed the United Nations south of the 38th parallel and recaptured Seoul in January 1951. The war then teeter-tottered back in the UN’s favor as the enemy overextended himself, and the front stabilized with Seoul back in the South’s hands by March. Truman hoped to negotiate a ceasefire as fighting descended into trench warfare reminiscent of the First World War in the early spring, but MacArthur hampered these efforts. He continued to criticize the president’s decisions and disobeyed a direct order by sending forces north of the 38th parallel. On April 11, 1951, Truman replaced MacArthur with General Matthew Ridgway, a capable field commander who had earned his soldiers’ trust and respect in the war and stabilized the front by pushing the enemy out of South Korea. President Truman’s actions reaffirmed civilian control over the military that MacArthur had tested in the midst of the war. Had he been allowed to use nuclear weapons in China at this early stage of the Cold War, the Pentagon concluded that this would have dragged the United States into what General Omar Bradley told Congress was “the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.”
Panmunjom
Life on the battlefield for soldiers soon became strangely routine, with long periods of waiting punctuated by sudden bursts of violence and facing the constant danger of sniper and artillery fire in an environment that could be as deadly as any enemy. Casualties mounted in places like Heartbreak Ridge and Pork Chop Hill, while gains were measured in yards and morale fluctuated as soldiers saw friends killed or wounded and questioned why they were so far from home and fighting in what they thought was someone else’s war.
Meanwhile, armistice talks began near the city of Kaesong, once part of South Korea but now in Northern hands. The biggest sticking point was how and when to exchange prisoners of war; both sides held hundreds of thousands, and most North Korean POWs refused to return home and hoped to build lives for themselves in the more free and prosperous South. And so the war dragged on into 1952, a presidential election year in the United States. The Republicans, out of power for twenty years and desperate to win the White House, saddled their Democratic opponents with blame for losses in “Mr. Truman’s War,” and Dwight Eisenhower won the election on a promise to bring peace to Korea. But his efforts stalled for two months until Joseph Stalin’s death in March 1953. The new Soviet leaders had no interest in aiding China and North Korea, preferring to fight amongst themselves over who would succeed the great leader. Mao could not continue the war without Soviet help, and the North Koreans were utterly spent as a combat force. In May, the United States tested a nuclear-tipped artillery shell, which tipped the balance in Pyongyang and Beijing—it was time to end the war.
On July 27, 1953, after more than a thousand days of bloodshed, representatives from North Korea, the People’s Republic of China, and the United Nations signed an armistice in a hastily-constructed building in the village of Panmunjom. Rhee Syngman refused his signature, and so no formal peace treaty could be concluded—though the armistice remains in force even now. Some territory changed hands along the 38th parallel, and the two Koreas established a demilitarized zone between their nations. North Korea claimed victory despite its devastating losses, and Kim Il-Sung’s prestige rose with his enslaved people, who worshipped him as a secular god—and continued to do so with his son, Kim Jong-Il, and grandson, Kim Jong-Un. Nineteen nations fought in the Korean War, and nearly all of them counted losses among the three million people killed in the conflict.
The Korean War was a test for both sides, and the results were mixed. Could North and South Korea survive as divided nations? Yes—with help from their more powerful allies. Could the Soviet Union and People's Republic of China prevent the democratic Western states from rolling back communism in the early days of the Cold War? Yes—but with horrific casualties for one of those nations. And could the United States contain communism's spread into free parts of the world? Yes—for the price of 33,000 soldiers killed in battle and 18,000 non-combat deaths, plus another 103,000 wounded and 10,000 captured or missing in action. Amidst the trauma of Vietnam a decade later, many Americans forgot what happened in Korea, and scholars still debate the necessity of this war in the Cold War's early days; did America need to fight the Korean War in defense of democracy and free enterprise, or was it the first of many blunders into war on the Asian mainland that would define our history in the last century and continue into this one?
