Category: Korean War

For anyone that likes to read about the Korean War, the Smithsonian Magazine has an interesting article that includes redacted testimony given by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Congress in regards to General Douglas MacArthur’s request to expand the war into mainland China.  In the redacted testimony the Joint Chiefs made a very good argument on why the limited war against China actually favored the United States military instead of hindering it during the Korean War:

Other remarks contradicted MacArthur’s recurrent complaint about the advantage the Chinese derived from the administration’s refusal to grant him permission to bomb targets beyond the Yalu River in China. Democrat Walter George of Georgia, echoing MacArthur’s assertion that “China is using the maximum of her force against us,” said it was unfair that MacArthur had to fight a limited war while the Chinese fought all out.

Omar Bradley responded that George was quite mistaken—and, by implication, that MacArthur was quite misleading. The Chinese were not fighting all out, not by a great deal. “They have not used air against our front line troops, against our lines of communication in Korea, our ports; they have not used air against our bases in Japan or against our naval air forces.” China’s restraint in these areas had been crucial to the survival of American and U.N. forces in Korea. On balance, Bradley said, the limited nature of the war benefited the United States at least as much as it did the Chinese. “We are fighting under rather favorable rules for ourselves.”

Vandenberg amplified this point. “You made the statement, as I recall it, that we were operating against the Chinese in a limited fashion, and that the Chinese were operating against us in an unlimited fashion,” the air chief said to Republican Harry Cain of Washington.

“Yes, sir,” Cain replied.

“I would like to point out that that operates just as much a limitation, so far, for the Chinese as it has for the United Nations troops in that our main base of supply is the Japanese islands. The port of Pusan is very important to us.”

“It is indeed.”

“Our naval forces are operating on the flanks allowing us naval gunfire support, carrier aircraft strikes, and the landing of such formations as the Inchon landing, all without the Chinese air force projecting itself into the area,” Vandenberg said. “Therefore, the sanctuary business, as it is called, is operating on both sides, and is not completely a limited war on our part.”

George Marshall, the secretary of defense and a five-star general himself, made the same argument. Marshall, insisting on “the greatest concern for confidentiality,” said he had asked the joint chiefs just hours before: “What happens to the Army if we do bomb, and what happens to our Army if we don’t bomb in that way.” The chiefs’ conclusion: “Their general view was that the loss of advantage with our troops on the ground was actually more than equaled by the advantages which we were deriving from not exposing our vulnerability to air attacks.”

In other words—and this was Marshall’s crucial point, as it had been Vandenberg’s—the limitations on the fighting in Korea, so loudly assailed by MacArthur and his supporters, in fact favored the American side.  [Smithsonian Magazine]

You can read much more at the link, but another fact of interest in the article was the assessment of Chiang Kai-shek’s military in Taiwan.  MacArthur had wanted to use Chiang’s army to open another front against the Communists.  His Army was however, assessed by the Joint Chiefs to be of little value due to poor training, equipment, and it was riddled with Communist infiltrators.  Additionally Chiang was assessed to have little to no legitimacy on mainland China.

All of this showed why President Truman fired MacArthur and also why the Republicans in Congress quietly withdrew support for him for President.  The Republicans instead threw their support behind another general, Dwight Eisenhower which history has shown was a far wiser choice for President than MacArthur.

[This Thursday] Celebrate one of history's most audacious wartime civilian rescue missions at The Korea Society

Get your tickets today! https://t.co/lEEDRG82jt pic.twitter.com/HLx9rNaznh

— The Korea Society (@koreasociety) December 11, 2017

A ROK Drop favorite Robert Neff has a good love story published in the Korea Times about a US Marine working in the US Embassy in Seoul during the time of the Korean War:

Recently, The Korea Times had the opportunity to interview George V. Lampman who, as a young Marine, was assigned to the American Embassy from 1949 to 1951. Despite being 90, Lampman has a youthful, if not mischievous, twinkle in his eyes, and is quick to smile as he recalls his time in Korea.

He arrived in Korea on Jan. 9, 1949, as part of the security detachment of the American Embassy in Seoul. It was a relatively easy assignment ― checking identification at the entrance of the embassy (located in the Bando Hotel, now the site of downtown Seoul’s Lotte Hotel) and staying out of trouble. The first part was easy but the second part was a little more difficult.

But things changed when Lee Sook-ei, a young Korean woman working in the communication section of the embassy, caught his attention. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.In the beginning their meetings were rather controlled: “Maybe a once-a-week dinner at a close-by Chinese restaurant and an occasional conversation in the Embassy lobby while we were both on breaks. But never a date between just the two of us.”

Eventually their attraction to one another overcame the potential disapproval of her mother and they began dating. But this was cut short by the evacuation of the embassy when the Korean War started on June 25, 1950.  [Korea Times]

I recommend reading the whole thing at the link.

Here is an interesting story from the Korean War that I had not heard of before about an orphaned baby that was taken aboard and cared for by sailors on a US ship:

Life could only get better for Danny Keenan after a Navy medic found him as an abandoned infant on the steps of an infirmary at a U.S. base in South Korea in 1953.

His luck changed so much for the better that it must have rubbed off on a gambling chaplain who won him a Korean passport in a poker game, wagering a bottle of the captain’s best scotch as the final, winning bet.

Before that, however, it appeared as though the baby might die of neglect in an orphanage, until Navy seamen, including two from La Crosse, took him aboard the USS Point Cruz (CVE 119) and doted on him.

“I never would have survived if not for the intervention of the skipper and the men of the Point Cruz,” the 64-year-old Keenan said during an interview last week in La Crosse.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read the rest at the link, but the baby was eventually adopted by a Navy surgeon and brought back to the US where he became Danny Keenan who attended Washington State University and became a sports journalist.

This is a pretty amazing sequence of events that reunited two Korean War buddies:

An event to console the families of American soldiers missing in action and prisoners of war during the 1950-53 Korean War at a hotel in Washington on Aug. 10, 2017. The U.S. Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) and South Korea’s veterans affairs ministry co-organized the event. (Photo courtesy of DPAA) (Yonhap)

Lt. Gen. Thomas Bergeson, commander of the U.S. 7th Air Force and deputy commander of the United Nations Command Korea (UNC), speaks during a UNC-hosted ceremony at the truce village of Panmunjom on July 27, 2017, to mark the 64th anniversary of the armistice that ended the 1950-53 Korean War. (Yonhap)

During a recent interview with Defense Secretary James Mattis conducted by a high school journalism student; Secretary Mattis recommended that people read a 2013 article in the Atlantic by James Wright that discusses what was learned from the Korean War.  The main point the article makes is that the Korean War began a trend of the US becoming involved in military conflicts before settling on political objectives:

Korea established a pattern that has been unfortunately followed in American wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. These are wars without declaration and without the political consensus and the resolve to meet specific and changing goals. They are improvisational wars. They are dangerous.

The wars of the last 63 years, ranging from Korea to Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq (but excepting Operation Desert Storm, which is an outlier from this pattern) have been marked by:

• Inconsistent or unclear military goals with no congressional declaration of war.

• Early presumptions on the part of the civilian leadership and some top military officials that this would be an easy operation. An exaggerated view of American military strength, a dismissal of the ability of the opposing forces, and little recognition of the need for innovation.

• Military action that, except during the first year in Korea, largely lacked geographical objectives of seize and hold.

• Military action with restricted rules of engagement and political constraints on the use of a full arsenal of firepower.

• Military action against enemy forces that have sanctuaries which are largely off-limits.

• Military action that is rhetorically in defense of democracy–ignoring the reality of the undemocratic nature of regimes in Seoul, Saigon, Baghdad, and Kabul.

• With the exception of some of the South Korean and South Vietnamese military units, these have been wars with in-country allies that were not dependable.

• Military action that civilian leaders modulate, often clumsily, between domestic political reassurance and international muscle-flexing. Downplaying the scale of deployment and length of commitment for the domestic audience and threatening expansion of these for the international community.

• Wars fought by increasingly less representative sectors of American society, which further encourages most Americans to pay little attention to the details of these encounters.

• Military action that is costly in lives and treasure and yet does not enjoy the support that wars require in a democracy.  [The Atlantic]

You can read the rest at the link.

The evacuation of Hungnam during the Korean War is a well known event, but I will have to read up more about Colonel Edward Forney’s part in the evacuation when I have the time:

The descendants of U.S. Marine Corps Colonel Edward Forney who helped evacuate about 100-thousand Koreans during the Korean War visited South Korea on Thursday.

The First Marine Division announced on Friday that it invited Forney’s granddaughter Alice Krug and great-grandson Ben Forney to mark June, which is the Month of Patriots and Veterans.

The two guests viewed a road named after Forney inside the unit in Pohang on the southeastern coast and an exhibition hall honoring his achievements.

Forney is considered to be a war hero because he persuaded then Commanding General of the U.S. X Corps, Edward Almond, to evacuate roughly 100-thousand refugees during the Hungnam evacuation in December 1950 from North Korea to the South.

He stayed on for three years after the war to serve as a senior adviser for South Korea’s Marine Corps.  [KBS World Radio]

The U.S. has an enduring friendship with a democratic South Korea, forged by the sacrifices of those who served in the ‘Forgotten War.’ pic.twitter.com/qTiXrBcG2n

— Paul Ryan (@SpeakerRyan) June 27, 2017