The Korean War: Barbarism Unleashed Part III

III. Military history of the war

General Fred C. Weyand, who later became a top assistant to Vietnam Commander William C. Westmoreland, noted that the “American way of war is particularly violent, deadly and dreadful.  We believe in using ‘things’ – artillery, bombs, massive firepower – in order to conserve our soldiers’ lives.”[78]  This strategy of enemy annihilation through superior firepower is rooted in the racial dehumanization of American enemies and a society that sees all progress through the lens of technological advance, in which a cult of technical rationality has corroded human solidarity and empathy.  Together with the Vietnam War, the Korean War exemplifies the horrors bred by U.S. style techno-war and its limitations in confronting enemies in distant locales whose motivations the Americans barely understood.

American confidence of victory in the war was heightened by the huge government investment in cutting edge weapons systems.  Building on the legacy of World War II, which had seen “the greatest mobilization of scientific power in the history of the world,” in the opinion of Dr. Karl T. Compton, President of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the U.S. employed a variety of lethal technological innovations in Korea:  three-and-a half inch rocket launchers, super-bazookas, Sikorsky and Bell helicopters, the M-26 Pershing and M-46 Patton tank equipped with a 90 mm gun, portable flamethrowers, amphibious tractors, white phosphorus grenades (“willie peter”), shells with radio controlled detonators, M20 75mm recoilless rifles, and radar-equipped jet fighter planes that were less vulnerable to ground attack.  In addition, the U.S. employed aerial refueling that allowed for long range bombing missions, used naval carriers as launch pads for aircraft, missiles guided by electronic computers, and television controlled planes serving as pilotless flying bombs.[79]  There was also the wonder weapon of napalm, jellied gasoline that burns the flesh, which was employed as an anti-tank weapon and whose flaming liquid could incinerate anything in its path over a radius thirty yards wide and ninety long, burning people’s skin to a crisp like “fried potato chips,” as one Marine witness described it.[80]

Tens of thousands were killed and countless villages were destroyed as a consequence of what journalist Reginald Thompson characterized as “machine warfare” in which “the slightest resistance brought down a deluge of destruction [by] dive bombers, tanks and artillery… blotting out the area.”[81] The country was left a wreck.  Yet despite the unprecedented firepower, the U.S. could not secure total victory against an enemy that had no Navy, virtually no Air Force, and scarcely any armor or artillery.

North Korean blitzkrieg and occupation of Seoul

Truong Giap, a Vietnamese revolutionary stated with much accuracy that “the Korean War was the most barbarous war in history.”  At the beginning, it looked as if the North would easily occupy the South and win.  Kim Il-Sung believed the southerners would rise up against their government and align with the North.  Yet he underestimated the effectiveness of Syngman Rhee’s repression of resistance movements prior to the war, and he overestimated popular support in the South for the northern government.  Furthermore, in the first days of the northern blitzkrieg, South Korean officers ordered the execution of thousands of political opponents, including those imprisoned, in order to deprive the North of fighters who could assist their cause.[82]

The North Korean People’s Army (KPA) crossed the 38^th parallel on June 25, routed the South Korean Army (ROKA), and then advanced down the peninsula with tanks, taking control of Seoul on June 28.  Rhee and his inner-circle fled.  The following morning, South Korean forces attempted to halt the KPA’s advance by destroying a bridge across the Han River, leaving hundreds of refugees to drown.  Many of the South Korea’s finest junior officers died in the fighting in the first days, with Gen. Paik Sun-Yup organizing anti-tank suicide teams equipped with hand grenades.[83]  Until the deployment of super-bazookas developed by scientists at Carnegie Tech, which shot off jet-driven shells traveling the speed of a slow meteor, American anti-tank weapons were often too light to effectively pierce tank armor. North Koreans were also able to disguise their tanks in mounds of dirt.[84]

The KPA was a motivated and disciplined force consisting of many veterans of the Chinese civil war.  On July 21, the KPA captured Taejon, 90 miles south of Seoul, routing American forces in what one historian described as “one of the most thoroughgoing defeats in American military history.”  The U.S. Eighth Army withdrew to Pusan in the south and formed a defensive perimeter defended by 85,000 U.S. troops.  The defensive perimeter held.

During their occupation of South Korea, North Korean forces linked up with local leftists in reactivating people’s committees driven underground by Rhee.  Schooled in Maoist principles, the KPA promoted agrarian reform and other principles of the revolution, attempting to win “hearts and minds,” especially among the working class, students, and women.  Many in Seoul reportedly shouted and waved red flags when the northern soldiers arrived.  An Air Force survey found that a majority of factory workers, students and women supported the KPA and that strict control over the media and political education helped keep the rest of the public in-line.[85]

The KPA also engaged in violent retribution against Rhee supporters in Seoul, killing an estimated 25,000 civilians.  Special “base red” units killed the entire families of police and military officers, and liberal intellectuals were publicly humiliated.  A police detective asserted that in the first few days, the citizens of Seoul welcomed the People’s Army and cooperated with it, but they became disappointed when promised rice supplies did not materialize, inflation spread, and they were forced to give their jewelry to the People’s Army.[86]

American morale went through a drastic shift in the first weeks of war.  Prior to the fighting, Brigadier General George Barth of the 24^thInfantry thought his troops displayed an “unfounded overconfidence bordering on arrogance,” an attitude replicated by headquarters, which had ordered officers to pack their summer uniforms in anticipation of a victory parade through Seoul.  With their tanks ill-suited for Korea’s mountainous terrain and radios malfunctioning, hundreds of young soldiers were cut to pieces on hillsides and riverbanks and in rice paddies during the retreat south.  Over four hundred were killed or taken prisoner in Chinju on July 26th.[87]  Despite America’s enormous firepower, military historians have suggested that cuts to the basic training regimen combined with a high turnover in personnel and stagnant army doctrine based on World War II practices resulted in a lack of preparedness and poor combat results.[88]

Cooperation between U.S. and South Korean soldiers also proved difficult.  American soldiers often distrusted their South Korean counterparts, considering them to be infiltrated by communist “gooks.”  A South Korean military officer interviewed for an army study pointed to a lack of patience and empathy by American military advisers, and “ignorance of each-others’ minds and liability to misunderstanding on account of differences in custom.”[89]  E. J. Kahn reported in The New Yorker that American soldiers felt that “North Korean soldiers, all things considered, fought more skillfully and aggressively than South Korean soldiers…. because they had been more thoroughly instilled with the will to fight.”

The incompetence, corruption, and venality of the ROK government were displayed when South Korean troops were left to freeze to death in the winter of 1951.  Their lack of proper equipment can be traced to the embezzlement of funds in the Defense Department.  Yi Yong-hui, an interpretation officer with the 9^th regiment testified that he had witnessed a scene right out of Dante’s hell in which soldiers “clothed in rags” walked “barefoot in snow and ice” and were forced to “spend the night in a freezing school playground.  Those that never got up after lying down were dragged without even straw-matting to cover their stiff corpses…. How could they abuse and treat so harshly these men who were not prisoners of war but their own brothers?  It was the cruelest of all crimes committed during the Korean War.”[90]

“So terrible a liberation:” Pusan, Inchon, Seoul, and Operation Rat Killer

U.S.-UN forces managed to reverse the KPA blitzkrieg at the Battle of Pusan Perimeter, which lasted from August 4 to September 16, 1950.  It was a great victory for U.S.-UN forces – and utterly brutal for both soldiers and civilians. Lt. Charles Payne of the U.S. 1^st battalion, 34^th infantry told an interviewer that “time and again, the gooks [slur for communist Koreans] rushed us.  Each time, we’d lose a man, the gooks would lose many.”[91] The town of Pusan was described by one soldier as a “filthy hole, diseased, [and] crammed with refugees.”[92]

In mid-September Gen. MacArthur engineered an amphibious landing behind enemy lines at Inchon.  The 230-ship invasion force was backed by helicopter spotters and ten Corsair and three Sky-raider air squadrons that carried out nearly 3,000 bombing sorties in a great display of combined air-sea power.  Over 13,000 Marines took advantage of a 31-foot tide and climbed over high seawalls before fighting off North Korean defenders, sustaining 3,500 casualties compared to over 20,000 North Koreans. “Operation Chromite,” as it was called, was enabled by the seizure of Wolmi-do Island, after it was showered with rockets, bombs and napalm, and by a joint CIA-military operation on Yonghung-do, a small island ten miles from Inchon, where Navy Lt. Eugene Clark obtained vital information for the assault.  When the KPA returned to Yonghung-do a few days later for a brief period, KPA soldiers allegedly shot more than 50 villagers, including “men and women, boys and girls, to demonstrate what happens to those who aid the Americans,” according to Col. Robert Heinl, Jr.[93]

American weaponry proved more lethal.  Following their victory at Inchon, the 1^st Marines commanded by the famously aggressive “Chesty” Puller marched on Yongdongpo, an industrial suburb of Seoul, and turned it into a “sea of fire,” according to U.S. intelligence, with as many as 2,000 killed.  An AP reporter flying overhead described Yongdongpo as looking “like Nagasaki after the atomic bomb, it has been here 4,000 years and no long exists as a city.”[94]  Puller’s men then retook Seoul on September 27 in brutal house-to-house fighting, breaking through enemy barricades of felled trees.

In a testament to the destruction bred by American weapons technology, a private described the newly “liberated” Seoul as being filled with “great gaping skeletons of blackened buildings with their windows blown out…telephone wires hanging down loosely from their poles; glass and bricks everywhere, literally a town shot to hell.” Reginald Thompson noted that few people in history “could have suffered so terrible a liberation.”[95]

By September 30, all of South Korea was under the control of ROKA, U.S., and UN forces.  American and South Korean counterinsurgency teams then began operations to snuff out partisan guerrillas across South Korea.  Under “Operation Houseburner” U.S. units sprayed flame-throwers and threw incendiary grenades from helicopters on the roofs of village huts in order to deprive communists of support.  When the structure of some homes remained allowing guerrillas to hide in the cellars, napalm mixture was added to ensure the mud walls came crumbling down.[96]

In the southern Chiri-san region, ROKA units rounded up some 1,000 villagers in Sinwon-myon following a guerrilla attack that killed a large number of policemen.  After releasing family members of army, police, and government officials, the remaining 719 people were accused of aiding the communists and executed on February 10 and 11, 1951, with 75 percent being children or elderly.  The counter-guerrilla effort was systematized in December 1951 under “Operation Rat Killer,” led by General James Van Fleet, who had experience fighting leftists in Greece.  Van Fleet believed that “in guerrilla war, the government which is being undermined should be under no obligation to protect the rights of person suspected of aiding the enemy.”[97]  Operation Rat Killer resulted in 19,779 reported guerrilla deaths and wide-scale forced displacement.[98]

MacArthur heads to the Yalu River

To lay the groundwork for the U.S.-UN invasion of the North, irregular warfare specialists from secret bases organized espionage and commando operations behind enemy lines.  The raids were led by southern refugees and Christian militias trained in seaborne infiltration, demolition and assassination.  Equipped with camouflaged weapons, explosives, miniaturized cameras that could display color pictures for the first time, and electronic surveillance gear, the units were molded after Col. Frank Merrill’s Marauders which fought the Japanese in Burma.  CIA operatives such as Anthony Poshepny and Garland Williams allegedly urged their patrols to prove victory by turning in the enemy’s ear.[99]

Clandestine flights in support of the operations were undertaken by Civil Air Transport, a CIA-subsidized airline founded by General Clare Chennault during China’s civil war, and an air intelligence wing headed by Harry “Heine Aderholt, a key figure later in the secret war in Laos.  The raids bombed weapons caches and KPA army barracks and ships.[100] Francesca Rhee, wife of Syngman Rhee and a patron of the arts, recruited young actresses to seduce high ranking North Korean and Chinese military officers in order to secure future battle plans.[101]  Some clandestine missions were run out of the CIA’s Tokyo office, headed by Danish resistance hero Hans V. Tofte and Lt. Col. Jack Y. Canon.  Japanese imperial army officers were recruited under the direction of Charles Willoughby.  Many commando units were infiltrated by double agents and killed, although Seoul CIA Station Chief Albert Haney doctored the intelligence reports to cover up their fate.[102]

The U.S. hoped to incite an anticommunist rebellion in North Korea but this proved untenable, as much of the population detested the Rhee regime and some were genuinely grateful to the Kim II-Sung regime for land allotted to them under the North Korean land reform program.  The CIA had cautioned the White House against invading North Korea because of the “risk of a general war,” and the unpopularity of the Rhee regime among “many if not a majority of non-communist Koreans.”[103]  The advice was ignored, however.

Washington also ignored two warnings from China.  On September 22, 1950, the Chinese Foreign Office announced that China would defend North Korea if Americans invaded.  Again, on October 1, Chinese foreign minister Zhou Enlai warned against “foreign aggression,” declaring that China would not allow the “imperialists” to occupy North Korea.  That same day, MacArthur issued orders for U.S. troops to move into North Korea.[104]   According to the U.S. Army military historian John S. Brown, “Convincing himself and his Far Eastern Command staff that the Chinese would not intervene in force, General MacArthur was determined to reunify Korea and change the balance of power in Asia.”[105]

As U.S. and South Korean forces moved into North Korea, they carried out what one contemporary termed a “nauseating reign of terror,” hanging captured KPA soldiers on ground-posts or tying up POWs and throwing them off a bridge into the Sok Dang River to drown.  These atrocities were carried out, in part, in retaliation for North Korean atrocities, such as the shooting of 30 Koreans hiding in a basement in Miryok-tang, and the Sinchon tunnel massacre, in which at least 68 American POWs who had been marched north were summarily executed and others were left to starve.

Francis Hill, a Colonel in the civil assistance office reported in November 1950 that ROKA soldiers would periodically go “commie hunting” and “drag former communists (or suspects) and their families from their villages” against official stipulations.  Interfering in some cases with the function of local authorities, the ROKA also stripped towns of their food stocks, took North Korean women, and in one instance shot thirty-four alleged communist prisoners in what Hill reported was a “verifiable incident.”[106]

At Sinchon, North Korea, thousands of civilians were hunted in caves, burned alive or shot by ROKA and police equipped with flamethrowers and incendiaries under the command of Kim San Ju (whom Rhee later executed for insubordination).  At least 15,000 civilians were also killed in Pyongyang which was made to resemble “an empty citadel where death is king,” according to the New York Times.  “It seems no longer to be a city at all. It is more like a blackened community of the dead, a charred ghost town from which all the living have fled before a sudden plague.”[107]

Army CIC attached to the 10^th corps were ordered to liquidate the North Korean labor party (which constituted as much as 14 percent of the population) and to forbid any political organization that might constitute a security threat.  Army intelligence suggested that Americans could organize “assassination squads” to kill guerrilla leaders, carrying out death sentences passed by the ROK government in absentia trials.  This became a model for the American Phoenix Operation during the Vietnam War.  Guerrilla-held areas were to be cleared and the population was to be turned against the guerrillas by every propaganda device possible.  If enemies were in civilian clothing, “we cannot execute them but they can be shot before they become prisoners” or otherwise “turned over to the ROK who will take care of them.”[108]

North Korean forces reorganized to fight in the hills during winter.  Citing a Maoist dictum, one of Kim’s guerrillas noted: “you fight when it profits you, watch and wait when it does not….Fight only when you know the situation…this is how a small army beats a big army.”  The U.S.-UN occupation of North Korea lasted less than two months.

Chinese counterattack and American retreat

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) was intent on resisting MacArthur’s invasion of North Korea, in part to pay back North Korea for supporting its revolution and in part because it wanted to ensure a strategic buffer to its south.  Jiang Jieshi’s Guomindang on the island of Formosa, with CIA assistance, was launching raids into China from northern Burma.  Mao also wanted to stand up to the West and reassert China’s stature on the global stage, according to the historian Shu Guang Zhang.[109]  Hence, as U.S.-UN forces approached the Yalu River, some 300,000 Chinese soldiers slipped across the river and attacked them on October 25, 1950.  When the Chinese momentarily retreated after ten days, MacArthur continued on to the Yalu River.  The Chinese struck again on November 25, attacking in the dark in order to negate the U.S. advantage in air power.

The Chinese infantrymen were effective in camouflaging themselves by crawling along stream beds, ravines, and thick trees.  Adopting a tactic known as niupitang, in which infantry used stealth and tunneling to approach a platoon, they ambushed U.S.-UN forces after feigning withdrawal. Commanding Chinese General Peng Dehuai believed that the Americans were over-dependent on firepower, afraid of heavy casualties, and lacked the depth of reserves the Chinese could amass.[110]  The Americans were also unable to march like the North Koreans and Chinese, who had better knowledge of the terrain and could cover 30 miles of mountain in a winter night, subsisting on a diet of cold boiled rice.[111]  Playing on these weaknesses, the Chinese forced MacArthur’s retreat at the Changjin (Chosin) Reservoir plateau in what one Marine called “the most violent small unit fighting in American history.”  Some 40,000 Chinese soldiers died as compared to 561 Marines.[112]

Many of the American soldiers suffered from frostbite owing to the lack of proper equipment.  One veteran said he could never figure out why a soldier of the richest country on earth had “to steal boots from soldiers’ of the poorest country on earth.”  In the unusually cold winter, vehicles once stopped would hardly run again, guns froze solid, and many automatic weapons would fire but one shot at a time.[113]  Terrified of fighting the Chinese, many ROK units broke ranks and disappeared.  In a desperate attempt to break enemy morale and create hardship for the population, the U.S. army chemical corps initiated a program that used incendiary bombs filled with napalm to destroy North Korean cereal crops ready for harvesting.[114]

Beginning on December 2, the American Eighth Army began a full-scale retreat, marching down frozen roads where they endured sniper fire. Pyongyang and other North Korean towns were plundered and put to the torch along the way, as orders were given to “shoot anything that moves.”  A Navy underwater demolition team turned Hungnam Port into a wasteland, while the roads became littered with dead animals and corpses.[115]  The retreating U.S.-UN forces continued past the 38^th parallel and abandoned Seoul to the advancing North Korean and Chinese armies in early January 1951.  Seeking scapegoats, some in the military claimed the North Koreans and Chinese had military advantage because of their “cheap evaluation of human life.”[116]

U.S. military intelligence director Charles Willoughby, notorious for supplying MacArthur with information he wanted to hear, had underestimated Chinese manpower and fighting capability.  American soldiers learned that the “best they had in the way of equipment” was “not good enough to halt a foe willing and determined to drive forward, taking any amount of losses to reach his objective.”[117]  Colonel Paul Freeman, who fought with Jiang Jieshi’s armies in World War II, said that “these are not the same Chinese.”[118]

The American retreat did not play well at home.  According to Look Magazine, it amounted to the military’s most “shameful disgrace” since northern troops had “cut and run at the first Battle of Bull Run in 1861.”[119]  Two former army intelligence officers writing in the same magazine criticized the military for its “obsession with” high-tech weaponry and for building its entire strategy around “these dazzling and lethal new weapons” while failing to properly “scout the rival team thoroughly as any football coach could have told them.”  We intended to “rely on superior weapons and quantities of them, not surprise, skillful strategies or wily traps to offset the numerical superiority of red manpower; bigger bombs and wonder weapons, rather than new ways of fighting or superior spirit…. The only flaw in these plans was that… our leaders failed to ask the enemy if he would play the role assigned to him”[120]  These comments encapsulate the technological hubris driving military commanders and limits of U.S. technology in confronting a motivated enemy capable of adopting guerrilla methods.  The unlearned lesson would be repeated in Vietnam.

In April 1951, the Americans regained the initiative and retook Seoul; and by June they had fought their way back to the 38^th parallel.  For the remainder of the war, neither side gained significant territory.  The conflict settled into a pattern of trench warfare reminiscent of World War I. T. R. Fehrenbach wrote that “on the frontier, there is rarely gallantry or glamor to wars, whether they are against red Indians or Red Chinese.  There is only killing.”[121]  Indeed, Chinese soldiers endured nearly one million casualties, including Mao Zedong’s son, Anying.

Negotiations to end the war began on July 10, 1951, and dragged on for two years before the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed on July 27, 1953.  The two sides divided over the demarcation line between north and south, the presence of U.S. airfields and troop levels, and terms of the repatriation of POWs.  Truman accused the communists of delaying the end of the war and proposed a demilitarized zone (DMZ) almost entirely in the DPRK.  The communist delegation accused the UN of repeatedly bombing near their headquarters for intimidation purposes and violating provisions of a temporary cease-fire agreement, which Gen. Matthew Ridgway acknowledged.  Ridgway, the chief negotiator, worried that an armistice would allow the Chinese, “freed from this embarrassing entanglement,” to expand their aggression in Indochina and elsewhere in East Asia.  As historian James I. Matray points out, the U.S. delegation also felt pressured by Syngman Rhee’s firm opposition to anything less than reunification under his rule as a major war aim (in contrast to Kim Il-Sung’s acceptance of the 38^th parallel line) and by his orchestration of huge demonstrations demanding a new offensive north.[122]

After a delay, negotiations resumed on October 25, 1951, in Panmunjon.  The Truman administration hedged further over the issue of POW repatriation, seeking to maximize the number of defectors in order to score a public relations victory in the Cold War, as historian Charles S. Young has detailed.  The POW issue was thus exploited to prolong the war in a slightly different but not totally dissimilar way to Vietnam two decades later.[123]

High noon: The Truman-MacArthur stand-off

In the wake of the Chinese and North Korean counteroffensive, there was talk in Washington of extending the war to China.  General MacArthur was intent on this option, but President Truman feared a quagmire.  In January 1951 Gen. Omar Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress that a war with China would be the “wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.”  He also suggested that America’s Cold War enemy, the Russians, were only peripherally involved in Korea, and that American forces needed to be concentrated in Western Europe.

In early April 1951, President Truman recalled and fired General Douglas MacArthur for insubordination, fearing that MacArthur’s aggressive policies would ignite a world war involving China and Russia.  MacArthur, with support from leading Republicans, wanted to take the war into China, despite U.S. setbacks in North Korea, and to use every means at America’s disposal, including nuclear weapons, to win the war.  He proposed a naval blockade off the Chinese coast; the bombing of China’s industrial centers, supply bases and communications networks; taking up exiled Chinese Guomindang leader Jieng Jieshi’s offer of using Chinese nationalist troops in Korea; and using Jieng’s forces for an invasion of the Chinese mainland.[124]  Gen. Matthew Ridgeway, MacArthur’s replacement, compared MacArthur to “Custer at the Little Bighorn [who] had neither eyes nor ears for information that might deter him from the swift attainment of his objective.”[125]

While Truman reasserted his control over the war, MacArthur became an icon to right-wing movements.  MacArthur gave a famous speech before Congress on April 19, 1951, in which he stated that “appeasement begets new and bloodier war” and that “old soldiers never die, they just fade away.”  He also told an interviewer that if he had not been fired, he had planned to drop between thirty to fifty atom bombs across the neck of Manchuria and “spread radio-active cobalt capable of wiping out animal life for at least 60 years.”[126]

The mainstream media sided with Truman in the dispute, but a Gallup found that 69 percent of the citizenry backed MacArthur.  The White House mail room was swamped with letters of protest, which outnumbered letters of support for Truman’s decision by 20-1.  In Ponca City, Oklahoma, a dummy of Secretary of State Dean Acheson was soaked in kerosene and set ablaze.  After MacArthur’s farewell speech, irate Americans phoned their newspapers denouncing the “traitorous State Department” which planned to “sell us down the river to… the Communists.”  The Republican Party policy committee accused the “Truman-Acheson-Marshall triumvirate” of planning a “super-Munich” in Asia and abandoning “China to the communists.”[127]

California’s freshman Republican Senator Richard M. Nixon shrewdly capitalized on MacArthur’s downfall, giving stump speeches asserting that the “happiest group in the country will be the communists and their stooges…. The president has given them what they always wanted, MacArthur’s scalp.”  MacArthur, said Nixon, had been fired simply because “he had the good sense and patriotism to ask that the hands of our fighting men in Korea be untied.”[128]  This right-wing theme was later applied to scapegoat peace activists and liberal politicians for America’s defeat in Vietnam.  After sponsoring a Senate resolution condemning Truman’s action, Nixon received 600 hundred telegrams in less than 24 hours, all commending him, the largest spontaneous reaction he’d ever seen, which in turn helped catapult him towards the White House.  The whole episode provides a revealing window into the intensely conservative political culture in the United States and hawkish impulses which later drove the U.S. to war in Vietnam.

Bombing ‘em back to the Stone Age:  Aerial techno-war over North Korea

The American Caesar, General Douglas MacArthur, was a boyhood friend of air power prophet Billy Mitchell, who had served under his father, Arthur, in the Philippines.  Like Mitchell, Douglas MacArthur’s worldview had been shaped by the horror of the trenches of World War I and he had adopted the view that since war was so horrible, whoever unleashed it should be obliterated; and that, in a righteous cause, there was no substitute for victory.[129]

In the latter spirit, MacArthur had warned that if the Chinese intervened, “our air power will turn the Yalu River into the bloodiest stream in all of history,” which is not far removed from what happened.[130]  From air bases in Okinawa and naval aircraft carriers, the U.S. Air Force launched over 698,000 tons of bombs (compared to 500,000 in the entire Pacific theater in World War II), making use of innovations like in-flight refueling systems, faster and more nimble engine-driven machines, and ground-radar controlled missions allowing for night bombing which Lt. Gen. Edwin M. Almond of X Corps called “an epic in our warfare.”[131]

US Air Force bombers destroy warehouses and dock facilities in Wonsan, North Korea, 1951 (US Dept of Defense-USIA)

Much of North Korea was left, in Maj. Gen. Emmett O’Donnell Jr.’s words, a “terrible mess,” with thousands of Chinese slaughtered, an estimated one million civilian casualties and hundreds of thousands of refugees.  Some of those refugees were napalmed by U.S. pilots under orders to “hit anything that moved.”  Eighteen out of 22 cities were obliterated, including 75 percent of Pyongyang and 100 percent of Sinuiju.  Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, later told an interviewer:

We slipped a note kind of under the door into the Pentagon and said, “Look, let us go up there…and burn down five of the biggest towns in North Korea – and they’re not very big – and that ought to stop it.”  Well, the answer to that was four or five screams – “You’ll kill a lot of non-combatants,” and “It’s too horrible.”  Yet over a period three years or so…we burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea, too… Now, over a period of three years this is palatable, but to kill a few people to stop this from happening – a lot of people can’t stomach it.[132]

Lending popular support to the air war was the fact that the strategic bomber had become iconic in popular culture at this time, with Hollywood films romanticizing World War II bombers and air power pioneer Billy Mitchell, who was played by the dashing Gary Cooper.[133]  In a vivid reflection of the political climate, Republicans and Democrats alike went on a reading spree of books by or about Mitchell, clearing out the Congressional library and Washington’s three second hand book stores.  Aviation Week reported in April 1951 that after an “awful rush,” bookstores were completely sold out of anything that even mentioned Mitchell.[134]

With North Korean air defenses almost non-existent, Soviet MIGs, flown by Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean pilots, appeared at the end of 1950.  They were sometimes effective as counterweights to the U.S. Air Force, although under Stalin’s orders, the Soviet warplanes were limited in number and the range they were allowed to fly, lest U.S.-Soviet air battles lead to a larger war.  Mission reports mention occasional ground fire by North Korean soldiers though the American bombers were usually able to operate unimpeded.[135]

The U.S. Air Force had pioneered airborne-radar early warning systems, some set up on naval blimps and night-functioning electronic interceptors, which contributed to air power supremacy.  Added to these innovations were computing gun-sights conceived by MIT’s Dr. Charles S. Draper and designed by Sperry Gyroscope Company, and range radar systems that automatically determined the distance to a target.[136]

In a 1945 essay entitled “Science-the Key to Air Supremacy,” Theodore Von Karman, chairman of the Air Force’s Scientific Advisory Group, confidently predicted a future built around supersonic piloted and pilotless aircraft and missiles, perfected navigation and communication, aerial transport of entire armies, and the ability to attack in all-weather conditions, which began to be fulfilled in Korea.[137]

The Korean War saw use of pilotless drone missiles (called Matadors) operated by radio and TV guidance via a Douglas Skyraider control plane.  The missiles prompted cryptic comments by the president and members of Congress about “a fantastic new weapon beyond imagination.”  Pilotless planes “loaded with death” were first invented by Elmer Sperry in World War I and were championed by Billy Mitchell as a “weapon of tremendous value.”  They became operational in World War II.  At the end of the conflict, Hap Arnold predicted that “the next war may be fought with airplanes with no men in them at all.”  Derived from the German V-2, made by Martin Company from old Grumman hellcats, and tested by the Naval Air Development Unit in Johnsville, Pennsylvania, the drones in Korea were launched from the U.S.S. Boxer as part of missions in Wonsan, Chosin, and Hungnam that helped cut off enemy supply lines.[138]  Air Force pilots told a New York Times reporter about how one drone they helped launch followed a group of Koreans pumping a railroad handcar into a tunnel.  When the Koreans saw the drone, they ran for cover in the tunnel which the drone followed them in, killing them and destroying the train.[139]

Bombing accuracy had improved considerably from World War II as a result of the development of remote control and precision-guided systems designed by General Electric and Fairchild and modeled after German Luftwaffe innovations by Nazi scientists recruited under the CIA’s Operation Paperclip.[140]  This was, in addition to photographic mapping, carried out by reconnaissance planes equipped with radar scopes and pictorial computers, and Tactical Air Control Parties that used aeronautical charts and computer calculators.  The U.S. invested $120 million per year at this time in guided missiles overseen by the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology.  The thousand pound Razon bombs were equipped with radio receivers and electronic circuits in their tails.  The bombs could be remotely controlled by the bombardier, allowing for changes in range and deflection.  The twelve hundred pound Tarzons also had electronically controlled tail surfaces permitting greater control and elevation after release as well as “avionic brains” that kept it locked onto a target magnified by radar and light beams.[141]

Push-button warfare was directed predominantly at major industrial plants in North Korea as well as railroads, bridges, communications centers and the electrical grid.  Schools and hospitals were also badly damaged or destroyed along with Kim Il Sung University, archeological sites, and treasured historical monuments such as the Kwangbop Buddhist temple dating to 392 A.D, the Potang City gate, the Sungryong Hall temple dating to 1429, and the Yang Myong temple dating to the 14^thcentury.[142]  DPRK leaders hid in deep bunkers, while villagers were forced to live in holes dug in the rubble of cities and sides of hills and caves where disease proliferated.

North Korean and Chinese fighters, like the Vietnamese, became adept at kneeling or squatting to evade detection.  They wore camouflage uniforms in the summer and white jackets in winter to blend in with the snow.[143] They also built dummy airfields filled with dummy aircrafts and petroleum dumps, camouflaged buildings and gun positions, and built shelters for trucks to hide in during the day.[144]  To protect civilians, North Koreans dug 776 miles of tunnels and 3,427 trenches, shifting 78 million cubic yards of rock and earth.  Entire factories were moved underground, along with schools, hospitals, bridges and government offices.  These practices enabled North Koreans to survive the massive bombing onslaught, though agriculture was devastated, as farmers could only tend to their fields at night.  The Nodong Sinmun newspaper referred to 1951 as “the year of unbearable trials.”[145]

Racial dehumanization was a pivotal factor accounting for the lack of American restraint in targeting civilians.  MacArthur believed that “the Oriental dies stoically because he thinks of death as the beginning of life.”  American bombers dropped thousands of leaflets warning civilians to stay off roads and away from facilities that might be bombed, but independent observers noted that American ground forces were much too “quick to call in overwhelming close air support to overcome any resistance in flammable Korean villages.”[146]  Pilots were often under orders not to return with any bombs.  According to Australian journalist Harry Gordon, who rode along in a B-26 Intruder, they would attack anything that moved, including ox-carts, resulting in “needless slaughter.”[147]

Mission reports at the U.S. National Archives provide a window into the detachment of the pilots and destructive effects of their operations.  These records detail in terse professional language the number of buildings, industrial facilities or trucks damaged or destroyed by rocket, napalm, dive bombing and strafing attacks and note the killing of enemy troops and pack animals and starting of large fires which were left burning.[148]

British journalist Reginald Thompson described “holocausts of death and jellied petroleum bombs spreading an abysmal desolation over whole communities. . . . In such warfare, the slayer merely touches a button and death is in the wings, blotting out the remote, the unknown people below.” The American investigative journalist I.F. Stone stated that sanitized reports of the air raids reflected a “gay moral imbecility utterly devoid of imagination – as if the flyers were playing in a bowling alley, with villages for pins.”[149]  These comments presaged Herbert Marcuse’s 1964 book, One Dimensional Man, which warned that a cult of technical efficiency coupled with the quest for military-technological supremacy and antipathy towards foreign cultures had severed human connections and empathy in industrial capitalist societies, resulting in the kind of barbaric “machine” warfare seen in Korea and later, Vietnam.[150]

Freda Kirchway, in an essay in The Nation, argued that American indifference to the destruction in Korea stemmed from the population having become “hardened by the methods of mass slaughter practiced first by Germans and Japanese and then, in self-defense, adopted and developed to the pitch of perfection at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. . . . We became accustomed to ‘area bombing,’ ‘saturation’ bombing, all the hideous forms of strategic air war aimed at wiping out not only military and industrial installations but whole populations.”[151]

As peace talks stalled in 1952, the Air Force destroyed the hydroelectric plant in Suiho that provided 90 percent of North Korea’s power supply.  In blatant violation of the 1949 Geneva Convention on the Protection of Civilians in Time of War, Article 56, U.S. bombers subsequently struck three irrigation dams in Toksan, Chasan, and Kuwonga, then attacked two more in Namsi and Taechon.  The effect was to unleash flooding and to disrupt the rice supply.  An Air Force study concluded that “the Westerner can little conceive the awesome meaning which the loss of this staple commodity has for the Asian – starvation and slow death.”  After the war it took 200,000 man days of labor to reconstruct the reservoir in Toksan alone.  “Only the very fine print of the New York Times war reports mentioned the dam hits,” the historian Bruce Cumings notes, “with no commentary.”[152]

In his book War Stars, H. Bruce Franklin details the American infatuation with developing a super-weapon capable of saving humanity from peril and ostensibly making war more humane by quickly and decisively eradicating the enemy.[153]  The reality in Korea was far different, however, as the North Korean government, like the Vietnamese a decade and a half later, was able to mobilize the population to fight on amidst the bombing and to rebuild roads and bridges that were destroyed.  General Ridgeway noted in a 1956 interview that he had “seen whole sections of railroad bombed into scrap iron by aircraft and yet the enemy rebuilt the tracks in a single night and the trains ran the next day.”  While inflicting serious damage on Chinese forces supporting the North Koreans, bombing did not “halt their offensive, nor materially diminish their strength.  Like the Vietnamese, the Chinese traveled light, with each man carrying his arms, his food and his weapon on his back. In a striking admission, Ridgeway added that “there is nothing in the present situation or in our code that requires us to bomb a small Asian nation back to the ‘stone age.’. . . There must be some moral limit to the means we use to achieve victory.”[154]

These comments epitomize the destructive and ultimately futile character of machine warfare.  The American population was ill-attuned to the situation, however, owing in large part to the political climate which attributed all atrocities to the communists.  Two journalists were removed from Korea for allegedly making the army “look bad.”  In 1953, polls showed that two thirds of Americans actually favored a greater application of military force, with many probably supporting the use of nuclear weapons.[155]  Oklahoma Senator Robert Kerr expressed pride in the fact that while “thousands of America’s noblest sons have died, in doing so they have inflicted terrible losses of at least ten for one upon the enemies of their homeland.”[156]  A frontier mentality that had once led to slaughter of the “savage” natives was now applied with greater force to “gooks” and “reds.”[157]

(Continued in Part IV)

About the author:  Jeremy Kuzmarov teaches history at the University of Tulsa.  He is author of The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs (Massachusetts, 2009) and Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century (Massachusetts, 2012).  He has been active in the Historians for Peace and Democracy, and the Tulsa Peace fellowship, and is a blogger for The Huffington Post.

The author thanks Roger Peace for his excellent editing and guidance, and also Mark Selden and Alfred W. McCoy.  Special acknowledgment is also given to the late Dr. Jack Tobin and the late Fred Branfman.  Archives Visited: National Archives, College Park, Maryland; Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri; Carl Albert Research Center, Norman, Oklahoma; and Woody Guthrie Archive, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

http://peacehistory-usfp.org/korean-war/

The 21st Century

[78] Weyand quoted in Charles Maechling Jr., “Counterinsurgency: The First Ordeal by Fire,” in Low Intensity Warfare: Counterinsurgency, Proinsurgency and Antiterrorism in the Eighties, ed. Michael T. Klare and Peter Kornbluh (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 43.

[79] Kompton quoted in Vannevar Bush, Endless Horizons (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1946). The use of the latest death technologies is detailed in U.S. Marines in the Korean War, ed. Charles R. Smith (Washington, D.C.: United States Marine Corps History Project, 2007). On the pioneering use of helicopters, see Lynn Montross, Cavalry of the Sky: The Story of U.S. Marine Combat Helicopters (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954). On guided missiles, see David Anderton, “Project Typhoon Aids Missile Designers: New Electronic Computer Can Solve Problem of Entire Defense System,” Aviation Week, December 18, 1950, and on drones, Lindesay Parrott, “Air War Now Main Effort in Korea,” New York Times, September 21, 1952.

[80] E.F. Bullene, “Wonder Weapon: Napalm,” U.S. Army Combat Forces Journal, November 1952; Earle J. Townsend, “They Don’t Like ‘Hell Bombs’” Washington Armed Forces Chemical Association, January 1951; Cumings, The Korean War. See also Robert M. Neer, Napalm: An American Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Napalm was developed by Harvard scientists encompassing napthenate and coconut palm added to gasoline at the end of World War II. Experimental missions were carried out on French civilians at the end of the war, including by bombardier Howard Zinn who became a life-long pacifist thereafter. See his You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002).

[81] Reginald Thompson, Cry Korea: The Korean War – A Reporters’ Notebook (Reportage Press, 2010), 94.

[82] Kim, The Unending Korean War.

[83] Allan Millett, They Came From the North: The War for Korea 1950-1951 (University Press of Kansas, 2010), 95; Callum MacDonald, Korea: The War before Vietnam (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 42; Sandler, The Korean War, 60. Dong Choon Kim notes that it was like a reenactment of the Hideyoshi invasions of the sixteenth century, rank and file soldiers and the righteous army defended the country with their own body after the King and government troops had fled.

[84] “New Enemy Tactics,” 8^th Army War Diaries, July 18-26, 1950, G-2 Staff Section Report, July 18, 1950, U.S. Army, Unit Diaries, History and Reports, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence Missouri, box 6; “The Tank-Killing Shaped Charge,” Life Magazine, October 23, 1950, 67; Andrew Cockburn, The Threat: Inside the Soviet Military Machine (New York: Random House, 1983), 138; Sandler, The Korean War; Kim, The Unending Korean War.

[85] Cumings, Origins of the Korean War II, 667; Armstrong, Tyranny of the Weak, 26; Hajimu, Cold War Crucible, 58, 59, 78; John W. Riley Jr. and Wilbur Schramm, The Reds Take a City (NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1951).

[86] “Statement by Detective Who Left Seoul, 20 July 1950,” 31 July 1950 in RG 338, Records of the U.S. Army Operations, Tactical and Support, box 58, National Archives, College Park Maryland; Kim, The Unending Korean War, 134-135; Gavan McCormack and Stewart Lone, Korea Since 1850 (London: St. Martin’s, 1993), 120; Report of the Committee on Government Operations Made Through its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Subcommittee on Korean War Atrocities, Jan. 7, 1954 (U.S. G.P.O., 1954), 4-6.

[87] John Melady, Korea; Canada’s Forgotten War (Toronto: McMillan, 1983), 56; Halberstam, The Coldest Winter; Sandler, The Korean War, 56, 76.

[88] William W. Epley, “America’s First Cold War Army” (Arlington, VA: The Institute of Land Warfare, 1999).

[89] Alfred R. Hausrath, “The KMAG Advisor: Role and Problems of the Military Advisor in Developing an Indigenous Army for Combat Operations in Korea” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Operational Research Office, 1957), 29.

[90] Kim, The Unending Korean War, 130.

[91] In Donald Knox, The Korean War: Pusan to Chosin: An Oral History (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 94.

[92] In Andrew Salmon, Scorched Earth, Black Snow: Britain and Australia in the Korean War (London: Aurum, 2011), 65.

[93] Heinl Jr. Victory at High Tide, 69, 102. See also Richard P. Hallion, The Naval Air War in Korea (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011); Eugene Clark, The Secrets of Inchon: The Untold Story of the Most Daring Mission of the Korean War (New York: G.P. Putnam, 2002).

[94] Suh Hee-Kyung, “Mass Civilian Killings by South Korean and U.S. Forces: Atrocities Before and During the Korean War,” Critical Asian Studies, 4, 12 (December 2010); Jon T. Hoffman, Chesty: The Story of Lieutenant General Lewis B. Puller, USMC (New York: Random House, 2002), 354; Heinl Jr., Victory at High Tide, 168. The city, Puller acknowledged, “lay in smoking ruins” after his men passed through it having asked and received MacArthur’s permission to put it to the torch.

[95] U.S. Marines in the Korean War, ed. Smith, 166, 178; Heinl Jr., Victory at High Tide; 237; 242; Thompson, Cry Korea; Marguerite Higgins, War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1951), 171. Reprisal killings were taken against northern collaborators when Seoul was retaken. Thompson, a correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph described Seoul as an “appalling inferno of din and destruction with the tearing noise of Corsair dive bombers blasting right ahead and the livid flashes of tank guns, the harsh, the fierce crackle of blazing wooden buildings, telegraph and high tension poles collapsing in utter chaos of wires. Great palls of smoke lie over us as massive buildings collapse in showers of sparks, puffing masses of smoke and rubble upon us in a terrific heat.”

[96] Lynn Montross, Cavalry of the Sky (New York: Harper, 1954), 173; Captain Walter G. Atkinson Jr., “Use of Portable Flamethrowers in 1^st Cavalry Division Sector,” August 30, 1950, RG 338, Records of the U.S Army Operations, Eighth Army Chemical Corps, Historical Files, Box 1433, National Archives, College Park Maryland.

[97] Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings, Korea: The Unknown War (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 163; Mark. J. Reardon, “Chasing a Chameleon: The U.S. Army Counterinsurgency Experience in Korea, 1945-1952,” In The U.S. Army and Irregular Warfare, 1775-2007, ed. Richard G. Davis (U.S. Army Center of Military History, 2008), 226; Paul F. Braim, The Will to Win: The Life of General James A. Van Fleet (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2001), 202.

[98] Kim, The Unending Korean War, 159; “Bandit Activities in South Korea,” in Command Report, Headquarters, Korean Communications Zone, September 1952, RG 554, Records of the General Headquarters, Far East Command, box 1, National Archives, College Park Maryland.

[99] Richard S. Ehrlich, “Death of a Dirty Fighter,” Asia Times, July 8, 2003; Stephen C. Mercado, The Shadow Warriors of Nakano: A History of the Imperial Japanese Army’s Intelligence School (Washington: D.C. Brassey’s, 2002), 224; Randall B. Woods, Shadow Warrior: William Egan Colby and the CIA (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 224. Poshepny was the prototype for Lt. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, a rogue CIA agent who embraced the dark side.

[100] William B. Breuer, Shadow Warriors: The Covert War in Korea (New York: John Wiley, 1996); Colonel Ben S. Malcolm, White Tigers: My Secret War in North Korea, with Ron Martz (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1992).

[101] Col. Michael E. Haas, Apollo’s Warriors: U.S. Air Force Special Operations During the Cold War (Maxwell Air Force Base: Air University Press, 1997), 26-27.

[102] Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 56, 57; Mercado, The Shadow Warriors of Nakano, 231; Nichol, How Many Times Can I Die?

[103] Hanley, Choe and Mendoza, The Bridge at No Gun Ri, 170.

[104] Paul M. Edwards, Korean War Almanac (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2006), pp. 103, 110.

[105] John S. Brown (U.S. Army Chief of Military History), “The Korean War: The Chinese Intervention,” online: http://www.history.army.mil/brochures/kw-chinter/chinter.htm.

[106] Historical Report for Period Ending 31 December 1952, War Crimes Division, Col. Claudius O. Wolfe, Zone Staff Judge Advocate and Major Jack R. Todd, JAGC, RG 554, Records of the General Headquarters, Korea Communications Zone, War Crimes Historical Files, War Crimes, box 20; Francis Hill, CAO, I Corps, November 10, 1950; November 16, 1950, Headquarters, 8^th U.S. Army, EUSAK, Civil Assistance Section, 10 November 1950, RG 338, 8^th U.S. Army, National Archives College Park Maryland, box 3403; 24^th CIC Detachment War Diary, July 1-November 1, 1950, RG 338, Records of U.S. Army Operations, 24^th Infantry, box 3483, National Archives, College Park Maryland.

[107] Mantell, “Opposition to the Korean War,” 156; Armstrong, Tyranny of the Weak, 38; Callum McDonald, “So Terrible a Liberation’: The UN Occupation of North Korea,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 12, 2 (April-June 1991): 10; Halliday and Cumings, Korea, 163; Katsiaficas, Asia’s Unknown Uprisings; Knox, The Korean War, 413; Dong-choon Kim, “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Korea: Uncovering the Hidden Korean War,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, March 1, 2010; Cumings, The Korean War, 198, 199.

[108] Kim, The Unending Korean War, 157; McCormack and Lone, Korea Since 1850, 150; Cumings, Origins of the Korean War II, 721.

[109] Shu Guang Zhang. Mao’s Military Romanticism: China and the Korean War, 1950-1953 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995); Chen Jian, China’s Road to the Korean War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Jager, Brothers at War, 56.

[110] Gibby, The Will to Win, 218; Bercuson, Blood on the Hills, 65.

[111] Montross, Cavalry of the Sky, 219.

[112] Glenn Garvin, “TV Review – When Hell Froze Over – the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir,” Miami Herald, March 25, 2013, http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/03/25/3305875/tv-review-when-hell-froze-over.html; Fehrenbach, This Kind of War, 375; Fehrenbach, This Kind of War, 375; Eric Hammel, Chosin: Heroic Ordeal of the Korean War(Zenith Press, 2007).

[113] Andrew Cockburn, “Follow the Money,” in The Pentagon Labyrinth, ed. Winslow T. Wheeler (Washington, D.C.: World Security Institute, 2011), 79; Halberstam, The Coldest Winter.

[114] Jerome S. Brower, Harold P. McCormick, “The Use of Incendiary Bombs for Cereal Crop Destruction,” May 29, 1951, RG 338, Records of the U.S Army Operations, Eighth Army Chemical Corps, Historical Files, Box 1433, National Archives, College Park Maryland.

[115] T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness (New York: McMillan, 1963), 406; Salmon, Scorched Earth, Black Snow, 307. For comparison with Vietnam, see Nick Turse, ‘Kill Anything That Moves’: The Real America War in Vietnam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014).

[116] Montross, Cavalry of the Sky, 219.

[117] Richard J.H. Johnston, “Outnumbered GIs Lost Faith in Arms: Morale Hard Hit as the Enemy, Disregarding His Losses, Retained the Initiative,” New York Times, December 10, 1950, 5.

[118] Halberstam, The Coldest Winter, 403, 473.

[119] Roy E. Appleman, Disaster in Korea: The Chinese Confront MacArthur (College Station, TX: Texas A &M Pres, 1989), 360; Garrett Underhill and Ronald Schiller, “The Tragedy of the U.S. Army,” Look Magazine, February 13, 1951, 27.

[120] Garrett Underhill and Ronald Schiller, “The Tragedy of the U.S. Army,” Look Magazine, February 13, 1951, 27-28.

[121] Fehrenbach, This Kind of War, 470.

[122] James I. Matray, “Mixed Message: The Korean Armistice Negotiations at Kaesong,” Pacific Historical Review, 81, 2 (May 2012), 221-244; Brandon K. Gauthier, “Korea: What it was like to Negotiate with North Korea 60 Years Ago,” The Atlantic Monthly, July 26, 2013; Burchett, This Monstrous War, 123-166. Echoing historian Clay Bair, Matray concludes that “it was the UNC that had established the acrimonious tone for the truce negotiations with its insulting opening proposal. It acted on instructions from Ridgway, who seemed more interested in proving his toughness and placating Rhee than in reaching a quick settlement.”

[123] Charles S. Young, Name, Rank and Serial Number: Exploiting Korean War POWs at Home and Abroad (New York: Oxford, 2014). For the exploitation of the POW issue in Vietnam, see H Bruce Franklin’s classic, M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1993).

[124] Ronald J. Caridi, “The GOP and the Korean War,” Pacific Historical Review, 37, 4 (November 1968), 432.

[125] Michael A. Bellesiles, A People’s History of the United States Military: Ordinary Soldiers Reflect on Their Experience of War, From the American Revolution to Afghanistan (New York: The New Press, 2012), 262 quoting Ridgeway; Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. II; Stanley Weintraub, MacArthur’s War: Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero (New York: The Free Press, 2000).

[126] Cumings, Origins of the Korean War II; Schurman, The Logic of World Power.

[127] William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880-1964 (New York: Laurel, 1978), 776; Richard H. Rovere and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. The General and the President and the Future of American Foreign Policy(New York: Farrar, Strauss and Young, 1951), 12.

[128] Manchester, American Caesar, 780.

[129] Manchester, American Caesar; Fehrenbach, This Kind of War, 427, 428.

[130] Heinl Jr., Victory at High Tide, 76; “”MacArthur on Air Power,” Aviation Week, April 30, 1951, 12; Manchester, American Caesar, 150-151.

[131] Futrell, “Tactical Employment of Strategic Air Power in Korea,” 40. For technological innovations, see also Richard P. Hallion, The Naval Air War in Korea (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011).

[132] Halliday and Cumings, Korea: The Unknown War, 117-118. According to Cumings, a partial table of the destruction shows: Pyongyang – 75%; Chongjin – 65%; Hamhung – 80%; Hungnam – 85%; Sariwon – 95%; Sinaju – 100%; Wonsan– 80%. Napalming of refugees is discussed in Tirman, The Deaths of Others, 104-05.

[133] Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 116.

[134] “MacArthur on Air Power,” Aviation Week, April 30, 1951, 12. The industry generally spent hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on public relations. Robert H. Wood, “How a Business Press Can Serve Its Industry,” Aviation Week, February 23, 1953.

[135] Charles K. Armstrong, “The Destruction and Reconstruction of North Korea, 1950 – 1960,” The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol. 8, Issue 51 No 2, December 20, 2010; Xiaoming Zhang, Red Wings over the Yalu: China, the Soviet Union, and the Air War in Korea (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002); E. Bregeweid, December 27, 1950, RG 342, U.S. Air Force Command, Mission Reports  of Units in Korean War, box 21, National Archives, College Park Maryland.

[136] Hanson W. Baldwin “The Whales of the Air Are Flying Again,” New York Times, August 14, 1955; Philip J. Klass, “Avionics New Role in Air Power,” Aviation Week, February 25, 1952, 65; “Avionics Puts Fighter on Target,” Aviation Week, March 2, 1953, 139. Blimps served as platforms for radar sentinels and electronic control systems designed to warn of enemy planes while engaging in antisubmarine warfare.

[137] Theodore Von Karman to Hap Arnold, December 15, 1945, in Prophecy Fulfilled: Towards a ‘New Horizon and Its Legacy’, ed. Michael H. Gorn (Create Space Publishing, 2012); Richard P. Hallion, George. Watson Jr., David Chenoweth, Technology and the Air Force: A Retrospective Assessment (Washington, D.C.: Air Force and Museums Program, 1997).

[138] Hallion, The Naval Air War in Korea; “Matador Opens New Era of Missile Warfare,” Aviation Week, September 24, 1951, 219; Lindesay Parrot, “Air War Now Main Effort in Korea,” New York Times, September 21, 1952; William B. Harwood, Raise Heaven and Earth: The Story of Martin Marietta People and Their Pioneering Achievements (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 252, 252. On origins see also Kenneth P. Werrell, The Evolution of the Cruise Missile(Maxwell, Air Force Base: Air University Press, 1985), 7, 36; Gordon Bruce, “Aerial Torpedo is Guided 100 Miles by Gyroscope,” New York Tribune, October 20, 1915, 1.

[139] “Navy Uses Robot Missiles against Targets in Korea,” New York Times, September 18, 1952; William J. Coughlin, “The Air Lessons of Korea,” Aviation Week, May 25, 1953; Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base (Boston: Little & Brown, 2011), 222. Drones were also used to survey nuclear testing in Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1946 that resulted in the expulsion of the local population.

[140] See Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America (Boston: Little & Brown, 2014); Linda Hunt, Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945-1990 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991).

[141] Paul G. Gillespie, Weapons of Choice: The Development of Precision Guided Munitions (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 45-51; “Heavyweights Over Korea: B-29 Employment in the Korean Air-War,” Air University Quarterly Review, 7, 1 (Spring 1954), 102, 103; David Anderton, “Project Typhoon Aids Missile Designers: New Electronic Computer Can Solve Problem of Entire Defense System,” Aviation Week, December 18, 1950; F. Lee Moore, “Flying a Bug Instead of a Beam,” Aviation Week, October 23, 1950, 57; Cabell Phillips, “Why We’re Not Fighting with Push Buttons,” New York Times, July 16, 1950, SM7. On Nazi scientists, see Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip.

[142] Nick Alexandrov, “Carpet Bombing History: Washington’s Anti-Monuments Men,” June 26-28, 2015, http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/26/carpet-bombing-history/; Commission of International Association of Democratic Lawyers, Report on U.S. Crimes in Korea, March 31, 1952, Pyongyang, Korea, www.wwpep.org/index/Resources_files/crime.pdf.

[143] 1^st Marine Special Action Report, Wonsan-Hamburg-Chosin, October 8, 1950-December 15, 1950, U.S. National Archives, College Park Maryland, RG 127, UDO40, Korea, G-2 ,Chosin Reservoir.

[144] “Communist Camouflage and Deception,” Air University Quarterly Review, 1, 1 (Spring 1953).

[145] Armstrong, “The Destruction and Reconstruction of North Korea, 1950 – 1960.”

[146] Conrad Crane, American Airpower Strategy in Korea, 1950-1953 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 40, 41, 43; Sahr Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage: Americans, Noncombatant Immunity, and Atrocity after World War II (New York: Routeledge, 2006), 149. One 60-year-old man, too sick to brush away hundreds of flies that swarmed him, told a New York Times reporter that he “wanted to die – I would rather die than live like this.”

[147] Author’s personal Interview, Korean War Pilots, Boston Commons, Peace demonstration against the Iraq War, fall 2005; Salmon, Scorched Earth, Black Snow, 407.

[148] Eg. Captain Pressly, December 27, 1950, RG 342, U.S. Air Force Command, Mission Reports of Units in Korean War, boxes 21, National Archives, College Park Maryland. In this report, Pressly reported rocketing, napalming and strafing enemy troops on a hill, with an estimated 300 troop casualties. He then reported strafing a village at CT 2416 and starting three fires. 8 rockets and four napalm. There are hundreds of reports like this in 122 boxes in RG 342.

[149] Thompson, Cry Korea; I.F. Stone, The Hidden History of the Korean War (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1952), 258; Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. II, 706-07.

[150] Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, with a new introduction by Douglas Kellner (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964, reprint 1991).

[151] Quoted in Marilyn B. Young, “Bombing Civilians From the Twentieth to the 21^st Centuries,” in Bombing Civilians, 2009, 160.

[152] Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol II, 705; “Attack on the Irrigation Dams in North Korea,” Air University Quarterly Review, 6 (Winter 1953-1954), 41.

[153] Franklin, War Stars.

[154] Quoted in Wilfred G. Burchett, Vietnam North (New York: International Publishers, 1966). The Air Force claimed that air power “executed the dominant role in the achievement of military objectives,” with the threatened devastation of North Korea’s agricultural economy forcing Kim Il-Sung to the bargaining table. Robert Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 141.

[155] Rick Shenkman, Political Animals: How Our Stone Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 185.

[156] Robert F. Kerr, Foreign Policy- Far East, Robert S. Kerr Papers, box 3, foreign policy, Carl Albert Congressional Research Center, Norman, OK.

[157] On the formative influence of the frontier, see Walter Hixson, American Settler Colonialism: A History (New York: McMillan, 2013).