Korea
is a peninsula east of China. It became part of the Chinese Empire
in 1637 and did not receive its independence until 1895 (Treaty of
Shimonoseli).
In
the early 20th century Russia and Japan both tried to gain control
of Korea. This resulted in the Russo-Japanese
War (1904-05). On 8th February, 1904, the Japanese Navy launched
a surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur.
The
Russian Navy fought two major battles
to try and relieve Port Arthur. At both Liao-Yang and Sha Ho, the
Russians were defeated and were forced to withdraw. On 2nd January,
1905, the Japanese finally captured Port Arthur. The Russian
Army also suffered 90,000 causalities in its failed attempt to
Mukden (February, 1905).
In
May, 1905, the Russian Navy was attacked
at Tsushima. Twenty Russian ships were sunk and another five were
captured. Only four Russian ships managed to reach safety at Vladivostok.
These
defeats led to criticism of the Russian government. Bloody
Sunday and the Potemkin Mutiny were
both partly caused by the unpopularity of the war. The increase in
revolutionary activity in Russia convinced Nicholas II that he needed
to bring an end to the conflict and accepted the offer of President
Theodore Roosevelt to mediate between the two countries.
Sergi
Witte led the Russian delegation at the peace conference held
in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in August, 1905. Under the terms of
the Treaty of Portsmouth: (i) The Liaotung Peninsula and the South
Manchurian Railway went to Japan; (ii) Russia recognized Korea as
a Japanese sphere of influence; (iii) The island of Sakhalin was divided
into two; (iv) The Northern Manchuria and the Chinese Eastern Railway
remained under Russian control.
In
November 1905 Japan took control of Korea and began settling Japanese
families in the country. By
1932 Kim
Il-Sung
had become leader of a guerrilla
group based in Korea. Over the next ten years he launched a series
of attacks against the Japanese. During the Second
World War the Japanese
Army arrived in Korea in large numbers and Kim was forced
to go and live in the Soviet Union.
The Yalta
Conference in 1945 agreed that Soviet and American troops would
occupy Korea after the war. The
country was divided at the 38th parallel and in 1948 the Soviet
Union
set up a
People's Democratic Republic in North Korea. At the same time the
United States helped establish the Republic of South Korea.
After the war Syngman
Rhee emerged
as the main right-wing politician in South Korea and in 1947 he received
the unofficial support of the United States government. In 1948 Rhee
became the first president of South Korea. He soon developed a reputation
for authoritarian rule and his political opponents were quickly silenced.
In
June 1949 the United States Army began to
withdraw from South Korea. Statements made by General Douglas
MacArthur and Dean Acheson suggested
that the United States did not see the area as being of prime importance.
Acheson argued that if South Korea was attacked: "The initial
reliance must be on the people attacked to resist it and then upon
the commitments of the entire civilized world under the Charter of
the United Nations."
Kim
Il-Sung,
the communist dictator of North Korea, became convinced that the people
in the south would welcome being ruled by his government. At dawn
on 25th June 1950, the North Koreans launched a surprise attack on
South Korea. Three days later, communist forces captured the South
Korean capital, Seoul.
The Security Council of the United Nations
recommended that troops should be sent to defend South Korea. As the
Soviet Union was boycotting the Security Council at the time, it was
unable to veto this decision. Fifteen nations sent troops to Korea,
where they were organized under the command of Douglas
MacArthur.
The surprise character of the attack enabled the North Koreans to
occupy all the South, except for the area around the port of Pusan.
On 15th September, 1950, Douglas MacArthur
landed American and South Korean marines at Inchon, 200 miles behind
the North Korean lines. The following day he launched a counter-attack
on the North Koreans. When they retreated, MacArthur's forces carried
the war northwards, reaching the Yalu River, the frontier between
Korea and China on 24th October, 1950.
Harry S. Truman and Dean
Acheson, the Secretary of State, told MacArthur to limit the war
to Korea. MacArthur disagreed, favoring an attack on Chinese forces.
Unwilling to accept the views of Truman and Acheson, MacArthur began
to make inflammatory statements indicating his disagreements with
the United States government.
MacArthur gained support from right-wing members of the Senate such
as Joe McCarthy who led the attack on
Truman's administration: "With half a million Communists in Korea
killing American men, Acheson says, 'Now let's be calm, let's do nothing'.
It is like advising a man whose family is being killed not to take
hasty action for fear he might alienate the affection of the murders."
In April 1951, Harry S. Truman removed
MacArthur from his command of the United Nations
forces in Korea. McCarthy now called for Truman to be impeached and
suggested that the president was drunk when he made the decision to
fire MacArthur: "Truman is surrounded by the Jessups, the Achesons,
the old Hiss crowd. Most of the tragic things are done at 1.30 and
2 o'clock in the morning when they've had time to get the President
cheerful."
While this conflict was taking place in the United States, the Chinese
government sent 180,000 men to North Korea. This back-up enabled North
Korean forces to take Seoul for a second time in January 1951. U.N.
troops eventually managed to halt the invasion sixty miles south of
the 38th parallel. A counter-offensive at the end of January gradually
recovered lost ground.
Once in control of South Korea, representatives of the United
Nations began peace talks with the North Korean government on
8th July 1951. An armistice agreement, maintaining the divided Korea,
was signed at Panmunjom on 27th July 1953. Over 25,600 American troops
were killed during the war and other U.N. contingents lost 17,000
men. It is estimated that including civilians, the Korean War cost
the lives of around 4 million people.
Map
from J. F. Aylett's The Cold War
(1)
Marguerite
Higgins,
New
York Tribune (18th September, 1950)
Heavily
laden U.S. Marines, is one of the most technically difficult amphibious
landings in history, stormed at sunset today over a ten-foot sea wall
in the heart of the port of Inchon and within an hour had taken three
commanding hills in the city.
I was in the fifth wave
that hit "Red Beach," which in reality was a rough, vertical
pile of stones over which the first assault troops had to scramble
with the aid of improvised landing ladders topped with steel hooks.
Despite a deadly and steady
pounding from naval guns and airplanes, enough North Koreans remained
alive close to
the beach to harass us with small-arms and mortar fire. They even
hurled hand grenades down at us as we crouched in
trenches, which unfortunately ran behind the
sea wall in the inland side.
It was far from the "virtually
unopposed" landing for which the troops had hoped after hearing
of the quick capture of Wolmi Island in the morning by an earlier
Marine assault. Wolmi is inside Inchon harbor and just off "Red
Beach." At
H-hour minus seventy, confident, joking Marines started climbing down
from the transport ship on cargo nest and dropping into small assault
boats. Our wave commander. Lieutenant R. J. Schening, a veteran of
five amphibious assaults, including Guadalcanal, hailed me with the
comment, "This has a good chance of being a pushover."
Because of tricky tides,
our transport had to stand down the channel and it was more than nine
miles to the rendezvous
point where our assault waves formed up.
The channel reverberated
with the ear-splitting boom of warship guns and rockets. Blue and
orange flames spurted from
the "Red Beach" area and a huge oil tank, on fire, sent
great black rings of smoke over the shore. Then the fire from the
big guns lifted and the planes that had been circling overhead swooped
low to rake their fire deep into the sea wall.
The first wave of our
assault troops was speeding toward the shore by now. It would be H-hour
(5:30 P.M.) in two minutes. Suddenly, bright-orange tracer bullets
spun out from the hill in our direction.
"My God! There are
still some left," Lieutenant Schening said. "Everybody get
down. Here we go!"
It was H-hour plus fifteen
minutes as we sped the last two thousand yards to the beach. About
halfway there the bright
tracers started cutting across the top of our little boat. "Look
at their faces now," said John Davies of the Newark News.
I turned and saw
that the men around me had
expressions contorted with anxiety.
We struck the sea wall
hard at a place where
it had crumbled into a canyon. The bullets
were whining persistently, spattering
the water around us. We clambered over
the high steel sides of the boat, dropping
into the water and, taking shelter beside
the boat as long as we could, snaked on
our stomachs up into a rock-strewn dip
in the sea wall.
In the sky there was good
news. A bright, white star shell from the high ground to our left
and an amber cluster told us that the first wave had taken their initial
objective, Observatory Hill. But whatever the luck of the first four
waves, we were relentlessly pinned down by rifle and automatic-weapon
fire coming down on us from another rise on the right.
There were some thirty
Marines and two correspondents crouched in the gouged-out sea wall.
Then another assault
boat swept up, disgorging about thirty more Marines. This went on
for two more waves until our hole was filled and Marines lying on
their stomachs were strung out all across the top of the sea wall.
(2)
Relman Morin, Associated Press (25th September, 1950)
Long after
the last shot is fired fired,
the weeds of hatred will be flourishing in Korea, nourished by blood
and bitter memories.
This is the heritage of
the short weeks during which most of South Korea was learning Communism.
Only weeks ago in the
region around Seoul and Inchon, people were being killed, dispossessed
of land and homes, left to starve, or driven away from all they held
dear - because they were not Communists and refused to act like Communists.
Today, in that same region,
the same things are still happening - because some Koreans are Communists
and propose to remain so.
Hidden in the hills a
mile off the road to Seoul, there is a village of twenty-four mud-stone
huts with thatched roofs. The
people raise rice and corn. Once they had a few cattle. There
were no rich here and, by Koreans standards, no poor either.
Even before the North
Korean military invasion last June, nine of the men in the village
were Communists. The headman didn't know why. He simply said they
belonged to a Red organization, and frequently went to meetings
in Inchon at night. They talked of the division of land and goods.
"It made trouble,"
the headman told an American intelligence officer through an interpreter.
She says the lectures talked
about life in Russia, how things are done there, and how good everything
is. She says it was convincing, and people believed what they heard.
"But she is
not a Communist. She went because she was hungry."
As a result, the headman
said, some of the other villages banded together and beat the Communists.
"There was always
trouble and fighting," said the headman, "and we talked
of driving the Reds away."
Then the North Korean
army swept southward over this little village. The nine Communists
suddenly appeared in uniforms. They killed some of their neighbors
and caused others to be put in jail at Inchon. The headman himself
fled to safety in the south. One of the villagers went with him.
"He did not want
to go," said the headman. "He was to be married. The girl
stayed here. She is 18 and a grown
woman, but she did not know what to do."
Back in the village the
nine Communists began putting theory into practice. First they confiscated
all land. Then they
summoned landless tenant farmers from nearby villages and told them
the land would be given to them if they became
Communists.
(3)
Keyes Beech, Chicago Daily News (11th December, 1950)
"Remember,"
drawled Colonel Lewis B. "Chesty" Puller, "whatever
you write, that this was no retreat. All that happened was we found
more Chinese behind us than in front of us. So we about-faced and
attacked."
I said "so long"
to Puller after three snowbound days with the 1st Marine Division,
4,000 feet above sea level in the sub-zero weather of Changjin Reservoir.
I climbed aboard a waiting C-47 at Koto Airstrip and looked around.
Sixteen shivering Marine
casualties - noses and eyes dripping from cold - huddled in their
bucket seats. They were the
last of more than 2,500 Marine casualties to be evacuated by the U.S.
Air Force under conditions considered flatly impossible. Whatever
this campaign was - retreat, withdrawal, or defeat - one thing can
be said with certainty. Not in the Marine Corps' long and bloody history
has there been anything like it. And if you'll pardon a personal recollection,
not at Tarawa or Iwo Jima, where casualties were much greater, did
I see men suffer as much.
The wonder isn't that
they fought their way out against overwhelming odds but that they
were able to survive the cold and fight at all. So far as the Marines
themselves are concerned, they ask that two things be recorded:
1. They didn't break.
They came out of Changjin Reservoir as an organized unit with most
of their equipment.
2. They brought out all
their wounded. They
brought out many of their dead. And most
of those they didn't bring out they buried.
It was not always easy
to separate dead from
wounded among the frozen figures that
lay strapped to radiators of jeeps and trucks.
I know because I watched them come
in from Yudam to Hagaru, 18 miles of
icy hell, five days ago.
That same day I stood
in the darkened corner
of a wind-whipped tent and listened
to a Marine officer brief his men for the
march to Koto the following day. I have
known him for a long time but in the semidarkness,
with my face half-covered by
my parka, he didn't recognize me. When
he did the meeting broke up. When we
were alone, he cried. After that he was all
right.
I hope he won't mind my
reporting he cried,
because he's a very large Marine and
a very tough guy.
He cried because he had
to have some sort of emotional release; because all his men were heroes
and wonderful people; because the next day he was going to have to
submit them to another phase in the trial by blood and ice. Besides,
he wasn't the only one who cried.
In the Marines' twelve-day,
forty-mile trek from Yudam to the "bottom of the hill,"
strange and terrible things happened.
Thousands of Chinese troops
- the Marines identified at least six divisions totaling 60,000 men
- boiled from every canyon and rained fire from every ridge. Sometimes
they came close enough to throw grenades into trucks, jeeps, and
ambulances.
(4)
Marguerite
Higgins,
War in Korea (1951)
I
met the Eighth Army commander. Lieutenant General Walton H. Walker,
for the first time when I returned to the front in mid-July after
MacArthur had lifted the ban on women correspondents in Korea. General
Walker was a short, stubby man of bulldog expression and defiant stance.
I wondered if he were trying to imitate the late General George Patton,
under whom he served in World War II as a corps commander.
General
Walker was very correct and absolutely frank with me.
He said he still
felt that the front was no place for a woman, but that
orders were orders and that from now on I could be assured of absolutely
equal treatment.
"If something had
happened to you, an American woman," the general
explained, "I would have gotten a terrible press. The American
public might never have forgiven me. So please be careful
and don't get yourself killed or captured."
General Walker kept his
promise of equal treatment, and from then
on, so far as the United States Army was concerned, I went about
my job with no more hindrance than the men.
(5) Adlai
Stevenson, speech, Louiseville
(27th September, 1952)
Last Monday General Eisenhower spoke in Cincinnati about Korea. He
said that this was a "solemn
subject" and that he was going to state the truth as he knew
it, "the truth - plain and unvarnished."
If only his speech had
measured up to this introduction! And since he has tried, not once
but several times, to make a vote-getting issue out of our ordeal
in Korea, I shall speak on this subject and address myself to the
record.
We are fighting in Korea,
the General declares, because the American Government grossly underestimated
the Soviet threat; because the Government allowed America to become
weak; because American weakness compelled us to withdraw our forces
from Korea; because we abandoned China to the communists; and, finally,
because we announced to all the world that we had written off most
of the. Far East.
That's what he says -
now let's look at the record.
First, the General accuses
the Government of having underestimated the Soviet threat. But what
about the General himself? At the end of the war he was a professional
soldier of great influence and prestige, to whom the American people
listened with respect. What did he have to say about the Soviet threat?
In the years after the war, the General himself saw "no reason"
- as he later wrote - why the Russian system of government and Western
democracy "could not live side by side in the world." In
November, 1945, he even told the House Military Affairs Committee:
"Nothing guides Russian policy so much as a desire for friendship
with the United States."
I have no wish to blow
any trumpets here. But in March, 1946, I said: "We must forsake
any hope that the Soviet Union is going to lie still and lick her
awful wounds. She's not. Peace treaties that reflect her legitimate
demands, friendly governments on her frontiers and an effective United
Nations Organization should be sufficient security. But evidently
they are not and she intends to advance her aims, many of them objectives
of the Czars, to the utmost."
(6)
Douglas
MacArthur wrote about
the arrival of General Matthew Ridgway
in his autobiography, Reminiscences (1964)
On December 23rd, General Walker was killed in a freak jeep accident.
It was a great personal loss to me. It had been "Johnny"
Walker who had held the line, with courage and brilliant generalship,
at the very bottom of Korea, until we could save him by slicing behind
the enemy's lines at Inchon. It had been Walker who, even in the darkest
hours, had always radiated cheerful confidence and rugged determination.
It was a difficult time
to change field commanders, but I acquired one of the best in General
Matthew Ridgway. An experienced leader with aggressive and fighting
qualities, he took command of the Eighth Army at its position near
the 38th parallel. After inspecting his new command, he felt he could
repulse any enemy attempt to dislodge it. On New Year's Day, however,
the Reds launched a general offensive in tremendous force, making
penetrations of up to 12 miles. It forced the Eighth Army into further
withdrawal. By January 4th, the enemy had recaptured Seoul, and by
January 7th, the Eighth Army had retired to new positions roughly
70 miles south of the 38th parallel.
(7)
Marguerite
Higgins,
War in Korea (1951)
Despite
large-scale reinforcements, our troops were still falling
back
fast. Our lines made a large semicircle around the city of Taegu.
The main pressure at that time was from the northwest down the Taejon-Taegu
road. But a new menace was developing with frightening rapidity way
to the southwest. For the Reds, making a huge arc around our outnumbered
troops, were sending spearheads to the south coast of Korea hundreds
of miles to our rear. They hoped to strike along the coast at Pusan,
the vital port through which most of our supplies funneled.
It was
at this time that General Walker issued his famous "stand or
die" order. The 1st Cavalry 25th Division were freshly arrived.
Like 24th Division before them, the new outfits had to learn for themselves
how to cope with this Indian-style warfare for which they were so
unprepared. Their soldiers were not yet battle-toughened. Taking into
account the overwhelming odds, some front-line
generals worried about the performance of their men and told us so
privately.
(8)
In an article in Newsday on 28th July, 1993, , Murray Kempton
suggests that General
Matthew Ridgway helped
to control the actions of Douglas MacArthur
in Korea.
In his autobiography, Ridgway
recalls a 1950 meeting where the Joint Chiefs of Staff wondered what
they could do to restrain General Douglas MacArthur from his head-over-heels
plunge toward the Chinese border and disaster in Korea. The chiefs
could already look at the map and recognize that MacArthur had arrayed
his troops as for a parade, divided their columns and left between
them the mountain where enemies could assemble in peace and await
the securest chance for war. The chiefs had passed the hours helplessly
struggling between their awe of a commander who had been riding with
the Cavalry when they were in rompers and their awareness of his terminal
folly.
Ridgway was then only deputy
Chief of Staff and forbidden to speak up in the company of his superiors.
Crisis compelled him to break the laws of silence at last. "We
owe it to ourselves," he said, to call MacArthur to halt; and
it must be done now because even tomorrow could be too late. The chiefs
sustained the shock of this breach of Old Army custom and continued
to sit inert until what they knew might happen did and all too soon.
After the meeting, Air
Force Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg congratulated him for his courage.
His answer was not thanks for the compliment but renewed urgings that
MacArthur be curbed. "Oh, what's the use," Vandenberg replied.
"He won't listen." And, thereafter of course, it would be
for Ridgway to restore the ruin of the Korean campaign.
(9)
Marguerite
Higgins,
War in Korea (1951)
A
reconnaissance officer came to the improvised command post and reported
that the soldiers landing on the coast were not a new enemy force
to overwhelm us, but South Korean allies.
On
the hill, soldiers were silencing some of the enemy fire. It was now
seven forty-five. It did not seem possible that so much could have
happened since the enemy had struck three quarters of an hour before.
As
the intensity of fire slackened slightly, soldiers started bringing
in the wounded from the hills, carrying them on their backs. I walked
over to the aid station. The mortars had been set up right next to
the medic's end of the schoolhouse. The guns provided a nerve-racking
accompaniment for the doctors and first-aid men as they ministered
to the wounded. Bullets were still striking this end of the building,
and both doctors and wounded had to keep low to avoid being hit. Because
of the sudden rush of casualties, all hands were frantically busy.
One
medic was running short of plasma but did not dare leave his patients
long enough to try to round up some more. I offered to administer
the remaining plasma and passed about an hour there, helping out as
best I could.
My
most vivid memory of the hour is Captain Logan Weston limping into
the station with a wound in his leg. He was patched up and promptly
turned around and headed for the hills again. Half an hour later he
was back with bullets in his shoulder and chest. Sitting on the floor
smoking a cigarette, the captain calmly remarked, "I guess I'd
better get a shot of morphine now. These last two are beginning to
hurt."
(10)
Tom
Hopkinson,
the editor of Picture
Post lost his job after publishing
a story on the Korean War. He wrote about the controversy in his book
Of
This Our Time (1982)
During their time in Korea
Hardy and Cameron made three picture stories, the most dramatic of
these being the record of General MacArthur's landing at Inchon, the
port of Seoul. Seoul was not only the capital of Korea but the key
centre of
communications for the invading armies - North Koreans backed by Chinese
- now operating far down to the south after
driving the South Koreans and their allies into what Cameron called
"the toehold enclave of Pusan". The Inchon landing effectively
cut the legs from under the attackers, dramatically reversing the
whole military situation. This was the second most powerful seaborne
invasion ever launched - only that against Normandy five years earlier
having been bigger - and our two men were the only British photo-journalists
present.
The Inchon landing was
not the only story our two men had sent back, and one of the others
posed a problem. Text and
photographs showed vividly how the South Koreans, with at least the
connivance of their American allies, were treating
their political prisoners, suspected opponents of the tyrant Synghman
Rhee. Rhee himself would in due course be ditched
as the insupportable head of an intolerable regime by the American
protectors who had kept him in power for so long; but that was still
ten years on into the future, and in the meantime Rhee and his henchmen
were our gallant allies and the upholders of our Christian democratic
way of life. By the 1980s we have all seen treatment of prisoners
more openly murderous than that revealed in Hardy's pictures, and
Cameron's accompanying article would today be accounted mild. But
in the climate of that time, with British and Australian troops
involved in the fighting, any criticism of South Koreans was certain
to be regarded as criticism of 'our' side. Such criticism, moreover,
being anti-Western, must inevitably be 'pro-Eastern', and hence -
with only a small distortion of language - 'Communist propaganda',
a crime of which I was already being accused by my employer.
(11)
John Hightower, Associated Press (26th March, 1951)
The dispute that rages
between General Douglas MacArthur and the Truman administration over
how to win the Korean war has reached fever heat again. The administration
may shortly ask the general to clear with broad foreign policy issues.
This may or may not prove
acceptable to MacArthur, but State Department officials as well as
some others with great influence at the White House privately say
something must be done to prevent a repetition of last week's exchange
of shocks and harsh words between Tokyo and Washington.
President Truman circulated
last December a firm, government-wide directive declaring that any
statement on foreign
policy by any official or employee of the government in a speech,
article or other public utterance, should be cleared with
the State Department. Informants said today that order was called
to MacArthur's attention at that time.
Friday night, Washington
time, MacArthur left Tokyo for the Thirty-eighth Parallel area of
Korea to order United Nations forces to cross into North Korea as
tactical requirements made necessary. Before leaving Tokyo he issued
a statement to the press.
In this statement he made
a bid for peace talks with his opposite number on the Communist side,
said the Chinese Reds were licked and incapable of waging modem war
and warned that if the United Nations launched attacks on Chinese
bases and coastal area the Red nation would probably suffer military
collapse.
This statement, a check
showed, caught the State Department completely unawares. It apparently
also caught President Truman without advance notice. After several
hours of parleying, including a talk between Secretary of State Acheson
and Mr. Truman, a rather meaningless statement was issued, designed
to say on Saturday that Washington had nothing to do with what MacArthur
had declared Friday night.
The statements said MacArthur
had authority to conduct military operations but that political issues
which "he has stated are beyond his responsibilities are being
dealt with in the U.N. and by the governments having troops in Korea."
The key MacArthur clause
which set off the alarm here was that the United Nations could probably
succeed in forcing a
military collapse of Red China by a limited coastal attack and base-bombing
war. A Tokyo dispatch yesterday suggested MacArthur probably was trying
to divert the Chinese Reds' attention from Korea to the
danger of a coastal attack.
Whatever his objective,
any statement he makes - even mingled in with "ifs" - about
extending the war in the Far East always sends huge shudders among
the Canadian, French, British and other friendly governments. When
the Europeans come in to the State Department wanting to know "what
does MacArthur propose
to do," Acheson and his aides get upset
about the problems of holding together
the political side of the coalition of which
MacArthur is military commander.
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