Part I: The Lead-up to the War and Initial North Korean Success
A damning re-assessment of US actions before the war, which almost led to total Communist victory
[NOTE: (10/27/20) In response to reader feedback, I created a whole new section exploring the roots of the conflict before 1945 in more detail. This section is not totally essential to the story but offers more details for those interested in both the history of East Asia and of Communism. Check it out here: https://christopherburton.substack.com/p/part-0-pre-1945-background-to-the
(1/21/21) Also after further research, I have added a section on the No Geun Ri Massacre, which also certainly deserves mention here.]
OVERLOOKED: The 38th Parallel and the years 1945-1950
While the Japanese occupation of 1905-45 and the Korean war are often seen as the most pivotal- and tragic- events to befall Korea in the 20th Century, the years between them are often overlooked. The temporary division of Korea at the 38th Parallel was discussed and confirmed at the Tehran and Yalta conferences during the war. Although the line made no sense geographically, it was devised in a time when all sorts of borders were being arbitrarily drawn by outside forces. The Soviet Union, as agreed, declared war on Japan in August 1945 and quickly overran Manchuria, taking control over their half of Korea by the end of the month. From then on, the destinies of the two Koreas rapidly diverged.
In the North, the Soviet-backed Communists were brutally effective in setting up an all-powerful dictatorship. For the first year, they put on a show of allowing non-Communist political organizations to operate, then used those groups’ membership lists to round up and execute or imprison members. The fact that major industries, including railroads and most mines and factories, had been owned by the Japanese made their nationalization relatively easy. When anti-communists (including many landowners and affluent collaborators) began to flee to the South, the Communists did not stop them. This saved them the trouble of getting rid of opponents and made it much easier to collectivize agriculture. From almost day one, the North Korean communists began building up a powerful military force with the goal of conquering the whole peninsula. Stalin and the Soviets fully supported them, providing all sorts of equipment including tanks, heavy artillery, and an air force as well as technical advisors.
South of the 38th Parallel, things went far less smoothly for the American occupiers. Mr. Kendrick makes a good analogy by asking us to imagine a scenario in which after the liberation of the Netherlands, the Allies decided to keep German troops on hand to help “maintain order” prevented exiled political leaders from returning, and announced a multi-year transition period before the country would be ready to rule itself. Something close to this situation occurred in South Korea in the years 1945-48. There were several reasons why Korea was subject to this treatment; while Allied memories of Korean soldiers- and particularly prison camp guards- loyally serving the Japanese were one factor, unfortunately the main one was colonialist racism. The goodwill of the Koreans towards the Americans was quickly squandered when the occupiers inexplicably decided to leave Japanese officials and police in their posts for weeks after the transfer of power, and then for months longer as advisors. Later efforts to establish a new bureaucracy and constabulary did attract thousands of recruits, but as many opportunists as dedicated idealists.
Meanwhile, the overnight removal of political repression quickly brought chaos to the political scene. The long-simmering disputes between different political factions quickly came to violence in the form of riots, sabotage, and political assassinations. President Rhee assumed control in 1948 after being elected by the National Assembly. His main rival, Kim Gu, won a small number of votes despite saying he would boycott the vote because North Korean provinces were not represented (given events in the North, by now their non-participation was a foregone conclusion). In the months after taking over, Rhee quickly clamped down on dissent, brutally crushing the Jeju Uprising and imprisoning tens of thousands of political opponents who were accused of Communist sympathies. Kim Gu was assassinated the following year, probably on his orders. While his regime was ruthless, it should be said that his loyalists were most often chosen for personal loyalty rather than ability, and many had venal reasons signing on. Despite their brutality, they were thus far less effective than the Communists at identifying and eliminating the real opponents of their regime. As for Rhee’s legacy, the reasons why a Christian convert who had lived peacefully in the U.S. for over 30 years would so quickly resort to censorship, murder, and brutality once in power are worth further exploration.
In 1949, several events happened that were to set the stage for the North Korean invasion in 1950. First, Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalists were decisively defeated in the Chinese Civil War, which allowed Stalin’s focus to turn towards Korea. The Soviet imposition of all-powerful totalitarian dictatorships in Eastern Europe was completed around the same time. Also that year, the Soviets successfully tested a nuclear bomb years before American intelligence predicted they would (due in large part to their successful infiltration of the Manhattan Project), thus vastly changing the balance of power between the two sides: although their arsenal of weapons remained larger, no longer could the Americans assume they could respond to a Soviet attack with a nuclear strike and not face retaliation.
OVERLOOKED: US negligence was a direct cause of the war
Many Americans tend to believe that its military has been in crack fighting shape since World War II. This is inaccurate; despite rising Cold War tensions, inertia in the government post-1945 seemed to be towards the status quo peacetime situation that the US had always known before 1941. Drastic budget cuts reduced the effectiveness and morale of the 1.6 million troops who remained in uniform (down from 12 million in 1945). The US garrison troops in Japan, who would make the first and most substantial contribution to the fighting during the first year of the war, were not the professionals who had fought in Okinawa. Very few had served in combat in WWII, and they were subject to lax discipline, spending lots of time drinking and whoring. They were also missing, or short on, all sorts of essential equipment from medical supplies to vehicle and radio maintenance tools, and the General Staff had not even drawn up plans for a defensive operation in Korea. Indeed, no US military force had entered a war in such a hopelessly unprepared state since the start of the Civil War in 1861. The disastrous consequences of this lack of preparation would quickly be seen. It was only after the Korean War that that paradigm of the US Army as a permanent professional fighting force was fully adopted. Despite their later acts of resolve and determination to fight, Truman and the General Staff deserve their share of the blame for this lack of preparedness, leading as it did to thousands of American casualties and the untold suffering of millions in South Korea. In modern times, Truman has rarely been criticized for these disastrous oversights; but the evidence against his administration here is damning, and also casts his contemporary critics in a much more favorable light.
The political mistakes of the Truman Administration in causing the war are perhaps more well known. In a calamitous speech during the spring of 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson outlined American commitments to defend a perimeter of countries in Asia and explicitly omitted South Korea from the list of countries. Historians still speculate over why; some believe that Truman still naively hoped to avoid conflict and wanted to avoid antagonizing Stalin, while others have suggested that Acheson was trying to deter Syngman Rhee from an offensive action; something he clearly wanted to do. In any case, Kim Il-Sung and Stalin both interpreted this as an admission that the US would not intervene. Few, if any, worse speeches have ever been given in American history.
MYTH: The South Korean Army in June 1950 was a hopeless basket case
The ROK Army's performance in the early days of the fighting has often been portrayed as one of hapless cowards running away in terror from a menacing enemy. This does not give them enough credit (their performance later in the war was much worse, but that will need to wait for later chapters). However, despite having 98,000 troops in the field in June 1950- nearly equal to the strength of the North Korean People's Army (KPA)- and having a defensive advantage, the ROK Army had two glaring weaknesses.
For reasons that seem similarly inexplicable in retrospect, the US had refused to provide the ROK Army with heavy weapons. This was to some extent because Rhee had already sent signals about his intentions to reunite the country by force, though one wonders how carefully he had considered the fact that North Korean equipment was vastly superior. But perhaps the more important reason was the same paradigm of US negligence and inattention as the post-war government sought to slash military spending.
President Rhee’s requests for tanks had been refused on the (easily disprovable) grounds that tanks were not suited to the terrain of Korea, while artillery pieces the ROK did possess were ineffective against tanks and had only about 2/3 the effective range of Soviet-produced guns, allowing KPA gunners to fire on ROK Army positions without the threat of return fire. Apart from tanks and heavier artillery, their requests for an air force had also been denied by the US, and the country had only 10 Canadian light training aircraft at the start of the conflict. Had the US made one almost innocuous decision and agreed to supply the ROK Army with antitank mines, the first few days of the war could have gone much differently (Note: even the US garrisons in Japan did not have a substantial supply of mines). Despite being so badly outgunned many ROK divisions fought bravely in the early days, and in cases when they were served with competent leadership (see below) and used the terrain to their advantage (i.e. where it was difficult for tanks to operate effectively), they were able to give as good as they got. In the Eastern half of the peninsula, ROK forces executed several effective fighting retreats that succeeded in delaying the enemy's advance and gave the UN forces time to regroup in Busan. These little-known actions may have decisively saved the country from being fully overrun.
Perhaps even more disastrously, President Rhee had compromised the Army by filling senior leadership positions with political allies rather than, as Mr. Kendrick puts it, “capable men who commanded the respect of their soldiers.” The most glaring example was General Staff Chairman "Fat Boy" Chae Byeong-Duk, who was given command of the Armed Forces despite being only 35 and never having seen combat while serving in the Japanese Army. As noted in Chapter 0, ROK officers in 1950 were former Japanese officers almost to a man, while KPA personnel were former guerrillas or veterans of the Chinese Communist Army or Soviet Army. Chae inexplicably canceled a military alert the day before the invasion, causing thousands of soldiers to be given weekend leave on June 24. Chae himself drank heavily that Saturday night. Then, days later, he and Rhee made the political (rather than strategic) decision to try to defend Seoul rather than falling back. That was not even his worst move. With the North Koreans still on the northern perimeter of Seoul, Chae prematurely ordered the demolition of the Han River bridges, which tragically killed hundreds of refugees trying to cross but even more tragically trapped the bulk of the ROK Army and nearly all of its heavy equipment on the wrong side of the river. A number of soldiers managed to swim or raft across but could carry only their rifles. Had the majority of the 40,000+ soldiers in Seoul been able to retreat in good order with their equipment, they could have formed the core of a defensive force that executed a fighting retreat with the aid of massive US air support. This could have prevented many of the disasters of the coming months, both military and humanitarian; alas, instead ROK Army units along most of the front rapidly disintegrated and would take months to rebuild.
Given Chae's actions in those fateful days, one might expect him to be included in a national pantheon of infamy with the likes of Lee Wan-Yong, but prior to listening to the podcast I had never heard of him, and he doesn't even have an English Wikipedia page. I am curious how others feel about this. Or perhaps this episode should call for an even more damning analysis of Rhee than most contemporary observers usually present.
OVERLOOKED: American racial prejudice was a large factor in early failures and casualties
The American Military, government, and public in 1950 had no idea of the kind of enemy they were dealing with in the North Koreans; for that matter, the civilian press was also largely unaware of the weakened state of the Armed Forces. All sorts of commentators, both military and political, predicted that the North Koreans were cowardly peasants who could be easily dealt with once a few Americans arrived. The fact that this sentiment was widespread surprised me given both the unprecedented ferocity of the Japanese in WWII and the tenacity of Chinese allies, both of which were widely remarked upon during the conflict. But apparently, it was widespread. In reality, of course, the invading KPA was staffed by tens of thousands of men with a decade-plus experience fighting both the Japanese and the Nationalists in the Chinese Civil War. They knew both how to fight and how to survive under very difficult conditions and were often able to function as both a standing force and a guerrilla force depending on the situation. (This is amazingly hard to do, folks; ask any army officer.)
For an almost comical example of the catastrophe that ensued when these forces squared off against the soft, lazy, and unprepared Americans, look at the Battle of Osan. In this battle, several battalions of the aforementioned garrison troops were rushed up to the front line and routed with very heavy casualties. Mr. Kendrick rightly notes that such a small and unprepared force would never have been sent to face a European enemy. Equally shocking to observers at the time was the phenomenon of bugging out, when groups of soldiers and even tank crews disobeyed orders and ran rather than fight, triggering mass panic. Before I listened to the podcast, I had had only a vague idea that any American troops had participated in the war before the September counter-offensive. They did, and with few exceptions were heavily defeated by the KPA. Only Allied air superiority, total naval supremacy, and devastating airstrikes that both weakened and delayed the North Koreans saved the UN and South Korea from total defeat.
Officers in those early days also made a number of inexplicable decisions. The US Army General in command of the initial task force, for example, was knocked unconscious and later captured when he decided to go out tank-hunting with a rocket launcher rather than coordinate the battle with his staff.
BURIED: friendly fire incidents
While American air power was the decisive factor in preventing the North Koreans' outright victory, lack of coordination (especially in the early days, before dispatchers arrived at the front) led to a series of tragic and devastating mistakes where both South Korean and Allied units were bombed by the US Air Force. A particularly grievous incident later in the summer saw napalm accidentally dropped on a Commonwealth battalion, with devastating casualties. While language difficulties were an issue in many of the cases, we should remember that in 1950 ground personnel and pilots could not communicate directly; that would not be possible until Vietnam.
DOWNPLAYED: The "police action"
This is somewhat more well known, but the Korean War was the first instance where the US entered a major conflict without a formal declaration of war, which set a powerful (and in the eyes of many, negative) precedent that continues to influence US foreign policy to this day.
What is less well known is that the characterization of the war as a police action emboldened the press to report freely- and often, salaciously- on the conflict (during WWII, they had acquiesced to heavy censorship with few complaints). This set an important precedent for what unfolded in Vietnam 15 years later, and the causality has largely been forgotten. One noteworthy heroic figure was Marguerite Higgins, who distinguished herself as much for her personal bravery filing muckraking reports for the New York Herald Tribune as for her tenacious challenge to gender prejudices of the era. After the commanding general in Korea tried to have her expelled from the country on the grounds that "war [was] no place for a woman," she made a successful appeal to General MacArthur who, much impressed by her gumption as well as her ability, permitted her to stay. Mr. Kendrick posits that Higgins' bravery and professionalism can be credited with helping to change perceptions of gender roles in combat zones.
FORGOTTEN: North Korean soldiers committed vicious war crimes and atrocities
Before I begin this section, it is important to remember that the Korean War was nothing if not a civil war, and Mr. Kendrick reminds us that civil wars are usually more vicious and fraught than ordinary ones. This makes perfect sense: not only opposing armies but also civilians are all too easily seen as traitors rather than people with the misfortune of being born somewhere else.
I should also confess that when I heard accounts of the North Korean atrocities committed against both the Allied and South Korean forces, I often had a visceral personal reaction of a different sort than when I read about, say, Nazi or Japanese War Crimes. The difference is that I still regard North Korea as an enemy nation (also, unlike in those other cases, the North Korean state still celebrates these actions). If readers think this is unfair, I might agree; especially given the context explained below. It is also a good lesson that few episodes in history are more likely to contribute to, and expose, personal biases than war crimes.
As mentioned above, the KPA soldiers who invaded in 1950 were hardened veterans of 10+ years of war against both the Japanese and the Chinese Nationalists. Both of those conflicts were brutish bloodbaths in which atrocities against opponents were seen by all sides as necessary and quarter was rarely offered. In other words, the brutality of warfare generally, and against POWs specifically, was what many if not most of the KPA soldiers had known for much of their lives. Also indelibly ingrained into the North Koreans, by both Communist ideology and experience, was the conviction that human life came very cheap.
There was never any doubt, or secret, about the North Korean desire to eliminate "unreliables." Some victims were certainly people who would have opposed them (though one can assume that their greatest opponents were wealthier citizens with the means to flee), but a more common situation usually involved ordinary people deciding that denouncing a neighbor who had let his cow graze on their rice paddy was preferable to being shot outright themselves. Other mass killings were quite deliberate: The fall of Seoul on June 28 saw the first wave of horrific massacres as the North Korean army viciously executed anyone deemed an opponent. A particularly vile incident occurred at Seoul National University Hospital, one of the country's few modern medical facilities at the time, when soldiers overran a battalion guarding the hospital and slaughtered over 900 doctors, nurses, and patients in cold blood. After the liberation of Daejeon later in fall 1950, UN soldiers remarked that the city resembled "a version of hell." The police station was filled with hundreds of rotting, fly-ridden corpses, including those of women and children, killed weeks earlier; many had been bludgeoned to death with clubs and bricks to conserve ammunition. A nearby church basement was found filled to the brim with the bodies of hundreds of women. These were far from isolated incidents; many similar ones were reported in other towns throughout the counteroffensive.
Mr. Kendrick remarks offhand that these massacres had the effect of "turning the South Korean people against communism up to the present day." This struck me as an interesting observation; the anti-communism prevalent among the older generation, and in particular of those aligned with the political right, is often blamed on the education system of the Park Chung-Hee era, which relentlessly portrayed North Koreans as "Red Devils". It should not be forgotten that these caricatures, however crude or exaggerated, to a large extent reflected the genuine experiences of those many South Koreans who witnessed these events.
The second category of North Korean atrocities, which I am quite surprised are not more well known, were their vicious war crimes against South Korean and Allied POWs. As mentioned above, veterans of a decade of brutal war were not likely to be well disposed to treat prisoners humanely, but an explanation should not be the same thing as an excuse. Simply put, for the first few months of the war allied prisoners were in an exceptionally large number of cases brutally beaten, tortured, and then executed- again, often with blunt objects to save ammunition. In addition to the moral depravity of such acts and the fact that they plainly violated multiple international treaties, the massacres quickly worried the KPA High Command for the simple reason that they were counterproductive. Upon learning what would happen if they surrendered, Allied troops quickly hardened their resolve and made life much more difficult for the North Koreans. Seeing this development, KPA commanders ordered that prisoners be treated humanely, but despite the Communists' penchant for brutal discipline, old habits died hard and the massacres would continue for months through the UN counteroffensive.
The extent of the third category of atrocities will likely never be known; unsurprisingly, although North Korea's most fervent anticommunists had already fled the country before the war, not everyone in North Korea was a fan of the Red Utopia, especially once the country was subjected mass conscription and the economic stresses of wartime. Church bells rang in Pyongyang to greet the Allies when they entered the city, and a cheering crowd formed to greet Rhee when he visited (this obviously staged incident should be viewed with some suspicion). It is more than reasonable to assume that Kim and his cronies mercilessly slaughtered any alleged traitors who failed to escape south after the Allies retreated.
BURIED: So did South Koreans, and what they did may have been worse when factoring in the official propaganda that they were fighting "for freedom."
Before diving into the issue of South Korean and ROK Army atrocities, it should be noted that plenty of South Korean citizens in 1948 were either convinced Communists or had the general opinion that the North was a better wagon to hitch onto. While Communist ideology had not gained much traction among South Korea’s then mostly rural population (See Chapter 0), the feelings of betrayal that came with the American occupation, the stifling repression of the new Rhee regime, and the fact that so many prominent figures in the government were former Japanese collaborators had not helped to instill patriotic feelings among citizens. A significant, though certainly not decisive, factor in Kim's decision to invade was a promise from the leader of the South's underground Communist movement that 200,000 willing recruits would quickly rise up and support him. While nothing close to this ever happened, and many of the several tens of thousands of South Koreans pressed into KPA service during the invasion did so under duress, there was a real national security threat from underground Communists.
Perhaps the single most ruthless act of the entire war was President Rhee's decision to execute tens of thousands of suspected Communists en masse as his army retreated. The so-called Bodo League massacres saw 60,000-200,000 South Korean citizens killed by their own government in cold blood. This was not, to repeat, a limited operation that got out of control in the heat of the moment, as the vague casualty estimates ought to suggest. Rhee ordered it and pretty much made it known to all that the more were killed, the better. As for the victims, it is safe to assume that a minority were Communists and fellow travelers who would have stood ready to join or aid the enemy when they arrived. A majority, however, were most likely innocent people caught in the crossfire. Here again, denunciations motivated by venality and resentment played as much a role as suspicions of treasonous activities.
An ongoing controversy involves the failure of the US to do anything to stop these massacres. Some documented incidents exist of American commanders trying to intervene, but MacArthur himself set the tone by referring to the massacres as an "internal matter."
As the war continued there were more massacres committed by South Korean troops, first as they advanced during the counteroffensive and later as they retreated ahead of the Chinese. The details are horrific, but I won't dwell on them here except to say that zealously carrying out these war crimes was not met with punishment by Rhee; quite the opposite. Such officers only rose higher amid reports of their activities. In the later stalemate phase of the war, there were a few strategically negligible operations in the South by pro-North guerrillas. In response, an army regiment massacred an entire village which was believed (with scant evidence) to have harbored rebels, including women and children. Remarkably, this incident, the Geochang Massacre, was so egregious it generated controversy even in the heat of the war under Rhee's stifling dictatorship. When a local National Assembly member first publicized the incident, the army arrested him and sentenced him to death for treason in response. By then, however, enough public anger had mounted that Rhee was forced to launch a second investigation that saw the lawmaker exonerated and two army generals sentenced to life in prison (however, they were pardoned a few years later).
What struck me about all this history is how it seems to have remained buried even as other brutal historical events like the Jeju and Gwangju massacres have gotten more publicity. I'm told there is now a memorial in Geochang and some efforts have been made to compensate relatives of the victims, but it still seems like necessary attention is lacking.
And that probably has something to do with the fact that the military is still, to put it charitably, apprehensive about these events getting public attention. As recently as 2010, a researcher was fired from the Military-backed Truth and Reconciliation Commission for reporting on documents related to Geochang they had only been allowed to view on the condition of confidentiality. And as with Jeju and Gwangju, increased attention to these incidents has also elicited defenses from some of the surviving perpetrators and their families. In 2008, the BBC tracked down a retired police officer who had executed dozens of alleged Communist sympathizers in the frantic first days of the war. The man defiantly justified his actions as a desperate measure necessary to save the nation in a time of crisis. Even as men like this have mostly died off, I would say the issues underlying the narrative are far from resolution.
BURIED AND FORGOTTEN: The nightmare for refugees
In the wake of the invasion, millions of people were displaced. Any South Korean with the means (and many with less) sought to flee from the Communist advance specifically and the terror of war generally. In the initial stages, refugee movements along Korea's primitive road network were a large factor complicating the Allied response. The North Koreans, for their part, quickly realized that they could use the crisis to their advantage by disguising special forces as refugees, who could then commit acts of espionage, sabotage, and assassination behind enemy lines. It is unknown how widespread these tactics were, but a few incidents, such as one where a seemingly pregnant refugee was discovered to be an infiltrator smuggling a radio through a checkpoint, appeared to confirm the Allies’ worst fears.
This resulted in some of the most heartbreaking scenes imaginable in any war, ever. As tens of thousands of desperate refugees streamed toward the Pusan Perimeter, Allied troops (both UN and South Korean) were ordered to prevent their entry, by force if necessary. The protocol was to fire warning shots first, then use live ammunition. Surviving accounts indicate that many soldiers and officers were very uncomfortable carrying out this order. Some refused... but most obeyed. I have not heard of any serious effort to explore this controversy in contemporary Korea. Have you?
[January 2021 Addendum: When I first wrote this section last year, I neglected to consider the story of the No Geun Ri massacre, one egregious incident which has indeed generated significant controversy both in South Korea and in its relations with the US, albeit decades after it occurred. In late July 1950, As many as 300 refugees, who had earlier been promised that they would be safely evacuated, were massacred by American forces as they retreated ahead of the North Korean Army. An overview of the event can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Gun_Ri_massacre
From the sources I’ve examined, the details of No Geun Ri appear galling even by the standards of what I described above. I just can’t grasp why, with the menacing North Korean army approaching, U.S. soldiers felt compelled to use heavy artillery and airplanes to slaughter as many as 300 civilians- including women and children- as they attempted to take shelter under a railway bridge. Of course, it is true that many characterizations of the incident ignore the context: rather than the powerful and confident American military of the popular imagination, soldiers at No Geun Ri were desperate, shell-shocked, and inexperienced troops in the process of running for their lives from a menacing and so far seemingly unstoppable enemy. But that hardly makes their decision to commit the atrocity more excusable. Looming over all of this is the fact that so far as I’ve been able to determine, exactly how high up the chain of command the orders went is still unclear.
When one hears about incidents like this, there is always the temptation to say that “of course awful things happen in war.” I have indeed been inclined to view many of the traumatic events of the Korean War in that light. However one feels about that sentiment, perhaps the most awful thing about the events of No Geu Ri was that for over 40 years, survivors and the families had to suffer their pain in silence. After the war, South Korea’s military governments made very clear to residents of the area that they were not to talk about what had happened. Petitions sent to the US Military for recognition and compensation went nowhere. Even after Koreas’s transition to democracy in the 90s gave activists a chance to speak out, the US government continued to deny responsibility for the massacre, asserting- contrary to testimony by survivors- that it had occurred in the heat of battle with the KPA. At various stages during these years, The Pentagon sought to conceal damning evidence. Finally, in 1998 the Associated Press released a well-sourced article that exposed both the true nature of the events and the extent of the ongoing cover-up. A few weeks before he left office in 2001, President Clinton issued a statement of “regret” and the US offered compensation in the form of a scholarship fund and the construction of a memorial park. This did not satisfy local residents and activists, who noted that the statement fell short of an apology and were particularly incensed that the memorial would be dedicated to all civilians killed in the war rather than those at No Geun Ri specifically. Eventually, the National Assembly allocated funds for the construction of a large memorial park in 2004; it was completed in 2011. A Little Pond, a film about the incident, was released in 2009.
If anyone deserves credit for bringing public attention to No Geun Ri, it is Chung Eun-Yong, who saw his two young children killed and his wife wounded in the massacre. After the war, Mr. Chung spent decades gathering evidence from government archives, which he was able to access due to his job as a police officer. After the end of the military dictatorship in the 1990s, he was finally able to publish a book- though it was initially rejected by many publishers- telling his family’s story. His continued activism eventually inspired the AP Investigation when Korea’s AP correspondent noticed him among a group of elderly men holding protest vigils outside the US Embassy. Before he died in 2014 at the age of 91, Mr. Chung lived to see the completion of the memorial park and was also able to attend a church service in Cleveland, Ohio in which he met with a group of US Army Veterans who’d participated in the massacre and prayed together for reconciliation.
While it is heartening that victims of No Geun Ri have finally, at unimaginable cost, received some deserved recognition, perhaps a cruel irony is that untold thousands more civilians were killed, wounded, and terrorized under circumstances that were only slightly less appalling.]
FORGOTTEN: Against the might of the US and UN, North Korea nearly won The Battle of the Pusan Perimeter
However interested you may be in military history, the Battle of the Pusan Perimeter is a battle to remember; Mr. Kendrick convincingly argues that it deserves its place alongside The Marne, Midway, and Stalingrad as one of the most pivotal of the 20th century. This bears repeating to readers currently in Korea: if a few developments in August and September 1950 had gone slightly differently, you would not be sitting where you are right now, reading this on a Samsung or LG smartphone screen.
By late August 1950, the US and its South Korean and UN Allies (the first significant Allied force, the Commonwealth Division*, having just arrived), were hemmed in around Pusan, not far in front of what commanding General Walker had called the last feasible defensive line. Since June, the US had rapidly mobilized for war, arriving with tens of thousands of fresh (if often green and untested) soldiers. In June and July, the Allies had repeatedly sacrificed space for time, and now space had run out. For the KPA, however, time was running out. Their supply lines were long, tenuous, and constantly subject to US bombing. By the first of September, they were outnumbered nearly 2-1 and faced as much as a 6-1 disadvantage in heavy artillery (note that those numbers are somewhat misleading, as the KPA had a much lower ratio of support staff to front-line soldiers). Thanks to great improvements in logistics, including the installation of several heavy loading cranes from Japan in Busan, The Allies were by now as well supplied with ammunition and provisions as any fighting force could expect to be. And yet, they nearly suffered a gruesome and humiliating defeat that would have made Dunkirk seem orderly and reduced the ROK Government's territory to a few offshore islands.
It would be easy to say that the Allies won the battle due to superior numbers, overwhelming firepower, and total air superiority, but that is not the end of the story. KPA generals knew well about the odds they were facing. In response, they decided on a tactic that would produce devastating casualties for both sides: get as close as possible to the enemy lines to negate the advantage of artillery and airstrikes and fight at point-blank range, often hand to hand. The Communists wagered that their superior fighting skills would be enough to overcome numbers and firepower, and judging from their runaway successes over the last two months, it was a chillingly plausible assumption. In the end, they failed, but only barely; though pushed perilously close to disaster on multiple occasions, at great cost US, South Korean, and Commonwealth troops held the line, and through their sacrifice, they made possible the lives we all enjoy in the country we know today. It should be noted that one reason for the KPA’s failure to break both US and South Korean lines was the fact that the North Korean army's core of crack veterans described above had steadily been lost to attrition. They had been replaced by conscripts, many of whom were South Koreans who had joined under duress and were far less effective than those who had spearheaded the invasion 2 months earlier. As time went on, there were fewer and fewer veteran troops to keep the new recruits in line.
The Allies, of course, would also soon get a boost from another action hundreds of kilometers to the north, in a place called Incheon.
[August 2020 Addendum: Several of the clashes along the Pusan Perimeter saw ROK Army forces put up strong resistance, helping prove to the US that they were capable of doing so when served with competent leadership. Among the "competent" South Korean commanders in these engagements was a young officer named Paik Sun-Yup, who passed away in July 2020 at the age of 99. Paik's legacy divided the country in death as it had in life. Conservative politicians idolized him as a savior of the country, while left-wingers hotly disputed the appropriateness of this status given his years of loyal service in the Japanese-Controlled Army of Manchukuo. However much one is inclined to belittle or embellish Gen. Paik's actions, his role in the battle and others were pivotal in turning the tide of the war and eventually in building the ROK Army into a professional fighting force. One thing can certainly be said about General Paik: he was among the very last of a bygone breed of men.]
*The Commonwealth Division was created in 1951; it arrived in 1950 as a smaller force known as the Commonwealth Brigade.
Further Reading:
Two articles on the debate over General Paik Sun-Yup’s funeral and legacy:
https://asiatimes.com/2020/07/koreas-top-communist-killer-passes-at-99/
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2020/07/113_292699.html
A BBC Article from 2008 in which a participant in the Bodo League Massacre defends his actions: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7567936.stm
A New York Times Obituary for Chung Eun-Yong, published on his death in 2014. While his life story is exceptional, I think it helps put a human face on the suffering endured by millions of civilians during the conflict: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/world/asia/chung-eun-yong-91-dies-helped-expose-us-killings-of-south-koreans.html