Historians have called the three-year “police action” that ended 40 years ago this week “The Forgotten War,” “The Hidden War” and “The Unknown War.”
For U.S. soldiers stationed next to the North Korean border, the lessons of the Korean War are anything but forgotten.
Each day, some of the 7,600 men in the Second Infantry Division-the advanced detachment of the 36,000 U.S. troops remaining in South Korea-prepare for a tank assault from the north.
Standing ankle-deep in the muddy residue of a summer monsoon, one soldier-born nearly two decades after the end of the conflict that brought him to this hidden valley-spoke eloquently of the lessons he’s learned from the war, which most Americans know only as a backdrop for the television comedy “M+A+S+H.”
“You hear a lot here about the mistakes of the past,” said Spec. Matthew Hoerner, a baby-faced 22-year-old who could have stepped out of a black-and-white Life magazine photo from that era. The kind of surprise attack that launched the Korean War on June 25, 1950, “is something we work very hard to avoid.”
The three-year Korean Conflict-another name for the undeclared war fought under the banner of the United Nations-took the lives of 54,246 Americans, just a few thousand fewer than died in the Vietnam War, which lasted three times as long.
Like Vietnam veterans, troops returning home from Korea received no parades and few honors. Many of those soldiers-card-carrying members of the Silent Generation-still harbor bitter memories of returning to a homefront that had no understanding of the terrible price they and their fallen comrades had paid abroad. Only now is a monument being built in Washington to honor their sacrifice.
And, like the Vietnam conflict, as the Korean War dragged on, a frustrated public turned against it. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower won the 1952 presidential election by pledging “I will go to Korea,” tacitly accepting for the first time in U.S. history that an honorable peace in a limited war was better than pursuit of the chimera of total victory.
If the immediate outcome left a bitter after-taste among a public that quickly shoved the war from its consciousness, the long-term impact on the U.S. cannot be overstated. The ideological rigidities of the Cold War era were firmly implanted in the body politic during the Korean War.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union shortly after the war started and were executed shortly before it ended. The McCarthy era – named after the Communist-hunting junior senator from Wisconsin – cost thousands of people their jobs and drove tens of thousands of innocent citizens from public life.
The complexities behind the fighting on the ground – the competing Korean nationalisms, China’s fear of encirclement and attack by the U.S. – were swept under the rug by Americans led to believe they were in a war against monolithic communism. The mistaken understanding of the Korean conflict would lead inexorably to another Asian land war, in Vietnam.
Culturally, the changes were just as profound. “I left to Glenn Miller and returned to Elvis Presley,” one GI recalled. The lunchbucket blue-collar worker gave way to the man in the gray flannel suit.
The U.S. military-industrial complex, which President Dwight Eisenhower would warn against in 1961, was created during the Korean War. Military spending had fallen from $82 billion a year at the end of World War II to $13 billion in 1950, just 5 percent of gross national product.
By the end of the Korean conflict, it was back to $50 billion, making war production a permanent feature of the U.S. industrial landscape. One little-known beneficiary was Japan, which was politically rehabilitated and began rebuilding its shattered industrial infrastructure with Korean War contracts.
“Korea does not really matter now; I’d never heard of the bloody place until I was 74,” Winston Churchill would say shortly after the war ended. “Its importance lies in the fact that it has led to the rearming of America.”
China challenges U.S.
The first hot war of the Cold War era began in an obscure Asian backwater that had been considered of little strategic significance by the superpowers.
By war’s end, that “bloody place” had brought the U.S. to the brink of nuclear war, as post-revolutionary China presented a shocking military challenge to the mighty U.S., which only recently had taken up the mantle of protecting the Free World for democracy.
Despite the titanic ideological forces that the war brought into play, the conflict at its heart was a civil war, pitting two diametrically opposed visions of a unified Korea against one another. The cruelty and callousness of that civil war left more than 2 million Koreans dead and their homeland in ruins.
Four decades later, the legacy of hatred and mistrust thrives on the Korean peninsula.
One by one, North Korea’s comrades in Moscow and Beijing have made their peace with their former enemies. But not north of the Demilitarized Zone, a 151-mile border snaking across the Korean peninsula that marks the exact location where the fighting stopped 40 years ago.
North of the line, North Korea and its aging dictator Kim Il Sung remain one of the world’s last true believers in communism. But that isn’t the glue that holds the country together.
The coterie that runs North Korea inherited the fortress mentality that made the ancient Chinese dub Korea “The Hermit Kingdom.” It is a tradition Americans knew nothing about when their leaders committed their sons to fight and die in that faraway land.
North Korea’s self-imposed isolation keeps the 2.6-mile wide strip of land that traverses this narrow peninsula the most heavily armed border in the world. Kim Il Sung and his son and heir apparent, Kim Jong Il, maintain a military garrison state that has elevated juche, or self reliance, to a virtue.
More Top Picks Air Fryers
They have repeatedly vowed to unify the Korean peninsula on their own terms. It’s a stance no different from the one taken on the day war broke out.
The roots of the Korean War go back to the last days of World War II when the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria to help the U.S. subdue the last remnants of the Japanese empire. Korea had been a Japanese colony since 1905, and independence fever burned throughout the peninsula.
The U.S. had expected the Soviets to bear the brunt of fighting against the 700,000 Imperial Japanese troops on the Far East mainland. At Potsdam, in July 1945, the Soviets agreed to occupy the entire peninsula. But when the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the war to a sudden end, U.S. thinking on Korea changed.
Just before Japan surrendered on Aug. 15, U.S. and Soviet officials met again to discuss the Korean occupation. Neither side considered the peninsula strategically important. The U.S. War Department’s John J. McCloy ordered two young colonels, one of them Dean Rusk, later secretary of state in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, into an adjoining room to pick a line for partitioning Korea.
They picked the 38th parallel, just north of Seoul. The Soviet army would administer the northern half, the U.S. the south. For the first time since 668 A.D., Korea was a divided country.
The Soviets moved quickly to establish a leftist government in the north.
They backed then 33-year-old Kim Il Sung, who had been a guerrilla leader fighting the Japanese in Manchuria. They created an effective political police. Leading conservative nationalists were arrested, and by the end of 1945 thousands of their supporters-many of them Christians-were fleeing south.
Most historians agree that American behavior in the south wasn’t much different. The U.S. military occupation under Gen. John R. Hodge reconstituted many of the institutions of Japanese colonialism and used Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese to help administer its zone.
The occupation was plagued by numerous peasant and labor protests organized by local leftists and Communists. They were savagely repressed by the National Police.
The U.S. also encouraged the return of Dr. Syngman Rhee, a 70-year-old nationalist leader educated at Princeton University, who was known for his stubborn ways and right-wing views. He became head of an interim government, backed primarily by a police force made up of Japanese collaborators.
Moscow proposed that the Soviet Union and the U.S. withdraw from the peninsula and let the Koreans decide their own fate. British historian Max Hastings said the Soviets were confident – “with good reason” – that the forces of the left would prevail in both Koreas.
The U.S. made the same the calculation. Instead in September 1947, Washington referred the Korean problem to the UN, which called for a Korea-wide election. The regime in the north and its sympathizers in the south boycotted the vote that took place in July 1948.
In the weeks leading up to the election, hundreds of people were killed by Rhee’s supporters. On Aug. 14, 1948, the Republic of (South) Korea was formed with Rhee as its president.
There was one big difference in the actions taken by the governments sponsoring the new regimes north and south of the 38th parallel: The Soviets helped Kim Il Sung build, train and arm a 135,000-man army, leaving behind much of its best World War II tanks and artillery. The South Korean army, on the other hand, was two-thirds its size, poorly trained and miserably equipped.
North Korea invades
In the early hours of June 25, 1950, the North Korean army poured south at several points along the 38th parallel. Recent scholarship, based on Russian archives, has shown that in the months before the invasion Kim Il Sung sought the approval of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. He also contacted Mao Tse-tung, who had just conquered China.
Neither leader believed the U.S. would intervene. Neither believed the South Koreans would provide much opposition. On the latter score, at least, they were right except in a few isolated pockets.
The new U.S. Central Intelligence Agency as early as March had warned of an impending North Korean attack in June. No one listened. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the 70-year-old supreme commander of the Far East, from his occupation headquarters in Tokyo repeatedly discounted the likelihood of war.
Two days after the invasion, the UN passed a resolution condemning the North Korean action. It called for withdrawal to the 38th parallel and asked all member nations to help execute its order. The Soviet Union boycotted the vote.
On June 30, President Harry Truman ordered U.S. ground forces into action. “The attack upon Korea makes it plain beyond all doubt that communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent nations and will now use armed invasion and war,” he told Congress.
Truman had faced down the Soviets with the Berlin airlift. He had announced the Truman Doctrine when giving aid to counteract an insurgency in Greece. Now, confronted by the first shooting war with communism, he committed troops.
The U.S. provided 90 percent of the troops that fought under the UN banner. Eventually 17 nations contributed to the cause, with Britain the second-largest contributor. There were more than 14,000 UN casualties from other nations, including 5,963 killed and missing.