Korean War Anniversary: What We’ve Chosen to Forget about the “Forgotten War”
American soldiers on foreign soil fighting to prop up an army of unmotivated conscripts. Savage bombings. Widespread use of napalm. Massacres of civilians by both the US Army and the allied army we’re propping up. Three million killed, and a larger proportion of civilian deaths than World War II. Lies upon lies about the background of the war and the enemy. What Bruce Cumings, former chair of the history department at the University of Chicago, describes as “Gooks, napalm, rapes, whores, an unreliable ally, a cunning enemy, fundamentally untrained G.I.’s fighting a war their top generals barely understood, fragging of officers, contempt for the know-nothing civilians back home, devilish battles indescribable even to loved ones, press handouts from… headquarters apparently scripted by comedians or lunatics, an ostensible vision of bringing freedom and liberty to a sordid dictatorship run by servants of… imperialism.”
At one point early in this war, the US Army feared that guerrilla fighters were disguising themselves as civilian peasants, and opened fire on them. “Fire on everything, kill ’em all”, one US Army veteran says they were told. “Over the course of a three-day barrage of gunfire and air strafing, hundreds of… civilians were killed,” one account reads. “Survivors recall a stream under the bridge running red with blood and 7th Cavalry veterans recall the near constant screams of women and children.” The US Army stonewalled, and journalists were pressured not to report the full story if at all.
The two paragraphs above are apt descriptions of the Vietnam War and the 1968 My Lai Massacre respectively. Except they are neither descriptions of the Vietnam War nor of My Lai, but instead of the Korean War and the No Gun Ri Massacre carried out by American troops in South Korea in late July 1950.
As a history educator, I’m always surprised at how my students–juniors and seniors in the Los Angeles Unified School District–know almost nothing about the Korean War. A few boys recognize it from their Call of Duty video games, a few others might have heard of the North Korean dictatorship’s bombastic threats, but of the Korean War itself, which ended 71 years ago this week, they know next to nothing.
Part of the problem is the textbooks we are given to use. Neither our US History book, the AP US History book, nor the World History book provide any substantive background to the war. We’re only told, as the regular US History textbook tells us, that “North Korean forces swept across the 38th parallel in a surprise attack on South Korea.” This is distortion by omission.
During WWII, the US and the Soviet Union agreed that, upon Japan’s surrender, Korea, which had been a Japanese colony since 1910, would be divided at the 38th parallel into a Northern, pro-Soviet sector and a Southern, pro-American sector.
The US installed Korean exile Syngman Rhee, who had lived in the US from 1912 to 1945, as the leader of South Korea. Rhee’s government and police force, and almost all leaders of South Korea’s Army, had served the colonial Japanese regime.
The Soviets installed the Korean communists into power, led by Kim Il Sung, who fought a guerrilla war against fascist Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea. The communists had credibility and support because of their long struggle to win Korea’s independence from Japan.
The US History textbook tells us that two Koreas then developed—“one communist and one democratic.” Actually, the “democratic” Rhee regime was brutal, authoritarian, corrupt, unpopular, and widely seen as an artificial creation of the US.
Rhee perpetrated horrific massacres of pro-Communist South Koreans, including the Jeju Massacre (1948-1949), in which up to 30,000 Koreans were killed, and the murder of 100,000 to 200,000 suspected Korean communists in the Bodo League massacre. For years, South Korea falsely claimed this crime was committed by North Korea.
Cumings, author of The Korean War: a History, refers to the US-backed regime’s “atrocious massacres…our ostensibly democratic ally was the worst offender, contrary to the American image of the North Koreans as fiendish terrorists.”
The megalomaniacal Rhee on numerous occasions proclaimed his determination to conquer the communist North. Ignoring American warnings not to provoke a war, Rhee foolishly launched military raids across the border, leading to the deaths of 8,000 South Korean soldiers and thousands of North Korean fighters. At the same time, North Korean-backed communist guerrillas launched guerrilla attacks in South Korea.
With both sides threatening to unify the country by force, the North invaded on June 25, 1950.
Even though the US-Soviet division of Korea gave the South twice the population of the North, the North quickly overran the South. As historian James Stokesbury explains, the masses of conscript South Korean soldiers had little loyalty to the Rhee regime, and soon retreated or defected en masse to the North.
Two days after the invasion, Rhee’s regime abandoned the capital, Seoul, detonating the Hangang Bridge over the Han River in an effort to slow down the North Korean advance. Thousands of refugees were crossing the bridge at the time, leading to hundreds of deaths.
After General Douglas MacArthur’s brilliant landing at Inchon, United Nations forces–90% of whom were American–pushed north towards the Chinese border, spurring China to enter the war. After major Chinese advances, the war ended in a stalemate.
Ignored in our textbooks are the horrific results of the US air war. Air Force General Curtis LeMay, head of the US Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, explained, “[W]e killed off…20 percent of the population…We…burned down every town in North Korea.”
Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk recalled “we were bombing every brick that was standing on top of another, everything that moved.”
In August 1951, war correspondent Tibor MerĂ¡y saw “complete devastation between the Yalu River and the capital…[there were] no more cities in North Korea.”
According to the Asia-Pacific Journal:
By the fall of 1952, there were no effective targets left for US planes to hit. Every significant town, city and industrial area in North Korea had already been bombed. In the spring of 1953, the Air Force targeted irrigation dams on the Yalu River, both to destroy the North Korean rice crop and to pressure the Chinese, who would have to supply more food aid to the North. Five reservoirs were hit, flooding thousands of acres of farmland, inundating whole towns and laying waste to the essential food source for millions of North Koreans.
U.S. planes dropped more bombs on the Korean peninsula— 635,000 tons — and more napalm — 32,557 tons — than against Japan during World War II. Yet, incredibly, the word “bomb” does not appear once in the US History textbook’s section on the Korean War.
Cumings says the US “carpet-bombed the north for three years with next to no concern for civilian casualties.”
Nor is there any mention of napalm in our texts. Then-British Prime Minister Winston Churchill condemned the US’ widespread use of napalm as being “very cruel,” saying the US was “tortur[ing] great masses of people” by “splashing it all over the civilian population.” He explained, “Napalm ought not to be used in the way it is being done by the American Forces.”
Nor do our texts mention No Gun Ri or other massacres perpetrated by the American forces. Former Associated Press international correspondent Charles Hanley, author of The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War, explains:
[T]he story of No Gun Ri was shocking when it emerged in 1999, but within the following decade it became clear that events like this were quite commonplace during the Korean War, and it is in some ways what war is all about.
The Associated Press explains that revelations about No Gun Ri “led to an outpouring of other accounts of alleged mass killings of southern civilians by the U.S. military in 1950-51, particularly air attacks. A South Korean investigative commission counted more than 200 cases on its docket by 2008, but the commission was disbanded by a new conservative government in 2010 before it could confirm more than a handful.”
The US History textbook spends 458 words on the conflict between President Truman and General MacArthur and tells us the war cost the US $67 billion and 54,000 killed (actually 36,574). Students are then asked to consider “whether fighting the Korean War was worthwhile” in light of “the loss of American lives” and “fear of communism.” Not once is there mention of the three million Koreans killed, mostly civilians, nor of the 600,000 Chinese killed.
The World History textbook we use is little better, though it does acknowledge that the South Korean government was “undemocratic.” The AP US History textbook, to its credit, acknowledges Korean civilian casualties caused by the American air war as well as the undemocratic nature of the South Korean government, but we’re still given no sense of the horrors perpetrated by the South Korean government nor of why North Korea invaded South Korea.
It is important to remember that misleading or faulty textbooks don’t simply miseducate students, they miseducate their teachers as well. History is a vast subject and any teacher, particularly younger or less experienced teachers, will have areas of history they’re unfamiliar with. In such cases, teachers rely upon the textbook and its related materials–if the textbook does not tell the full truth about an historical event, often the teacher will not be able to either.
The Korean War is often dubbed the “Forgotten War”, and there’s some truth to this, but the real issue is what the American educational establishment has chosen to forget about the “Forgotten War”.
