Why The Korean War Was Worse Than You Thought

The Korean War, which took place from June 25, 1950 to July 27, 1953, is one of the less well-known conflicts that the U.S. has been involved in. After years of barely restrained hostility, communist North Korea invaded South Korea. This had nothing to do with America, so why did the U.S. enter the Korean War in the first place? Essentially, the Cold War: The U.S. was already worried about expanding communist influence in the world and didn't want to see Korea united under a non-democratic government. It wasn't just the U.S., either, as the United Nations played a major role in the Korean War. Soon China got involved, and suddenly major powers from around the globe were trying to fight a proxy Cold War battle in the small Asian country.

President-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower went to Korea at the end of 1952 and realized the war was unwinnable for either side. He said, "We could not stand forever on a static front and continue to accept casualties without any visible results. Small attacks on small hills would not end this war" (via the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library). Seven months into his administration, an armistice was signed and the Korean peninsula was divided along the 38th parallel, making the previous three years effectively pointless. This was all the more tragic because the Korean War included some of the most horrible atrocities ever seen in modern combat.

In most wars, the goal is to kill members of the enemy forces. In Korea, that started out being the case, but eventually went completely out the window for every military involved. Civilians were not just collateral damage, they were specifically targeted in many cases. This resulted in a truly staggering number of non-combatant deaths. There are no hard numbers (North Korea has never admitted how many people they lost) but likely somewhere between 2 and 4 million civilians were killed, the vast majority of the casualties of the war. 

Nor was this normal for the time. The major U.S. conflicts on either side of the Korean War — World War II and the Vietnam War — did not have anywhere near the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths that Korea did. And while many died from dropping bombs, the U.S. was aware that they were dying of other causes, too.

In 1984, during a public discussion by several high-ranking military men, General Curtis LeMay explained how the brass felt about the fact their troops were involved in killing so many unarmed, innocent civilians. He stated, "Over a period of three years or so we killed off, what, 20 percent of the population of Korea, as direct casualties of war or from starvation and exposure? Over a period of three years, this seemed to be acceptable to everybody..." (via "Strategic Air Warfare: An Interview with Generals Curtis E. LeMay, Leon W. Johnson, David A. Burchinal, and Jack J. Catton").

Even today, North Korea hates U.S. bombers, and for good reason. More bombs were dropped on that small area than the Pacific forces as a whole dropped during WWII. For three years, the Air Force dropped a seemingly unending number of bombs on the country. They followed that up with napalm. "We were bombing with conventional weapons everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another," said Dean Rusk, then the United States Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, according to "The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot: A True Story About the Birth of Tyranny in North Korea" by Blaine Harden. The result was total and utter destruction.

The U.S. had firebombed Japan in WWII, and many in charge expected to do it again in Korea. In 1984, General Curtis LeMay recalled, "Right at the start of the war, unofficially I slipped a message in 'under the carpet' in the Pentagon that we ought to turn SAC [Strategic Air Command] loose with incendiaries on some North Korean towns. The answer came back, under the carpet again, that there would be too many civilian casualties; we couldn't do anything like that" (via "Strategic Air Warfare"). 

That attitude didn't last long. After the rules on bombing were loosened, General George Stratemeyer wrote in his diary, "Every installation, facility, and village in North Korea now becomes a military and tactical target" (via Asia-Pacific Journal). Now, no one was safe from the barrage.

The Korean War is technically still ongoing, and shockingly, to this day the North is holding POWs from the South. When the armistice was signed, around 80,000 South Korean troops were on the wrong side of the 38th parallel. Hundreds were still alive and being held by North Korea well into the 21st century. In many cases, their families believed they had been killed in battle, and at least some were told as much by the South Korean government itself. Learning the truth has been pretty shocking for these families.

The POWs who were forced to stay in North Korea were told to assimilate, but it was hellish. They were placed in assigned marriages and given the lowest rank on the country's official social scale, which meant they were constantly watched and denied the few rights that regular North Koreans had. They worked in coal mines and were often sent to work camps for the tiniest mistakes. 

After decades of this mistreatment, some escaped through China. "We were discriminated against, spied on and watched. We were not allowed to move," Yoo Chul-soo told Reuters in 2010. "The POWs who remain are still living in fear. I was 70 years old when I escaped in 2000 and I knew it was better to die trying than to die in North Korea alone." Armed with living proof of the POWs existence, South Korea began to negotiate for their release, albeit with limited results.

The Battle of the Chosin Reservoir involved the 1st Marine Division of the U.S. X Corps fighting Chinese forces on the side of North Korea. It became clear pretty early on that the Marines could not win at the reservoir. The strategy swiftly changed to retreat to South Korea and survive. Commanding General Oliver P. Smith famously said of what the U.S. troops were doing: "Retreat, hell. We're not retreating. We're just advancing in another direction." However, the Chinese needed to destroy the division and failed. This meant the battle was not really won by either side, which would make it a bit of a disaster all on its own, but it was the deadly part of the battle that had nothing to do with bullets that made it particularly bad. 

The reservoir was in a mountainous region of North Korea and it was December. With temperatures at 25 below zero, soldiers were forced to pile up frozen corpses as protection from enemy fire. Almost double the number of U.S. marines died from cold as from fighting. This helped make it one of the deadliest battles of the Korean War.

Robert Whited fought in Korea and was present at the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir. He told his story to History in 2018, saying, "Some of the Chinese prisoners that we got, they were happy to be with us. I just absolutely felt sorry for them. Their feet were nothing but ice."

In modern warfare, militaries are supposed to treat their POWs according to international law. Those standards came in 1949 with the signing of the Geneva Convention. One year later, the U.N. went into Korea, but seemingly everyone on both sides ignored these brand-new guidelines.

American troops were starved and beaten in North Korean POW camps. They were forced on death marches and shot when they were too exhausted to keep going. However, Chinese and North Korean POWs faced equally bad treatment in the South. In 2000, a Chinese veteran of the Korean War named Zhang Da told The Japan Times about the torture he endured: "I can't remember how many times I passed out. Once when I was unconscious, I was tied to a pole and they put a tattoo on my left arm — 'Oppose communism and fight the Soviet Union.'"

The POWs may have been the main reason the war lasted as long as it did. While willing to trade POWs and discuss peace as early as 1951, the U.S. said that all the POWs in U.N. and South Korean hands had to be given the option to return to Taiwan — a U.S. ally — rather than being forced to go home to China. Zhang Da explained, "We were under terrible pressure to choose Taiwan. Those who dared to declare openly their wish to return to China were persecuted, even killed. The Americans knew what was going on and encouraged it."

The National Defense Corps incident is a horrible stain on the South Korean government. At the end of 1950, in order to increase their fighting force, South Korea began drafting men to fight in the war. These draftees were sent to training camps, where they were to receive training, food, and shelter. The problem was that some of the military brass in charge of doing this decided to take the billions of won (about $2 million in 1951) allotted for it and embezzle the money instead. The result was unbelievable suffering inflicted on their own people.

During what would become a 300-mile death march, men died in astonishing numbers. Draftees would later say that they went days without food, and when they were fed, it was worse than what most armies would feed their animals. Tens of thousands died of starvation and malnutrition. Along the way, they were housed in abandoned buildings without heat or adequate clothing to stay warm in below-zero temperatures, without even beds. By the end of the three-week march, 300,000 men were missing (assumed to be deserters escaping the torture of the march) or dead.

When deserters returned home with tales of what they endured, the public was furious. Five people would be convicted for their participation in the scheme, although they were mostly scapegoats, while the men who were really responsible faced no punishment. After the unusual step of making their court martial public, five men were executed.

The Hill 303 Massacre took place during the Battle of Taegu in August 1950, when the war had barely begun. North Korean troops had captured 46 U.S. soldiers, but were forced to retreat during a counter-attack. They decided the POWs would slow them down and summarily executed them.

One of the few survivors, an 18-year-old soldier named Roy Manring, was questioned about his experience by an officer in 1950. His story was published in Time. "About 3 or 4 in the afternoon, they got us up and moved us again down near a ditch. There was 20 of them on this side of us, and 20 over here. I heard the Reds' weapons going off and I heard our boys groaning and grunting. I said to myself: 'Please, Lord, don't let 'em get us with these burp guns.'" Sadly, 41 of Manring's comrades were killed. He only survived by the greatest of luck and quick thinking.

He said, "The Reds walked up and down the line of prisoners, shooting. I was hit in the leg. I reached down to my leg and got some blood and smeared it on my head and I laid down under a dead man. I didn't move a muscle. When they came back along the line I got shot in the arm but I didn't yell." This decision would result in Manring being one of only five U.S. soldiers to survive the massacre. He was able to run to safety and tell the story of what happened.

In a war full of civilian massacres, it takes quite a lot to be notable. However, the Seoul National University Hospital Massacre was particularly terrible even compared to others on the long list of atrocities that occurred during the Korean War. 

On June 25, 1950, North Korean troops invaded the South, starting the Korean War. Two days later, the South Korean government fled the capital. The day after that, Seoul fell to the North Korean forces. The atrocities began immediately. The same day they took the city, North Korean troops entered the Seoul National University Hospital. There they methodically went from room to room, killing everyone they found. This included injured soldiers, doctors, nurses, other medical staff, and anyone unlucky enough to be in the hospital at the time. Under no rules of war would the killings, even of the injured soldiers, be justified. It was a slaughter. Estimates of how many people were killed vary from 700-900.

[Featured image by parkyongjoo via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 3.0]

Since the Korean War ended, the scale of the atrocities on both sides slowly became clear. One of the most shocking aspects was that U.N. and South Korean troops killed people on their own sides. "There were a lot of massacres during the war, not at the frontline, away from the frontline, where people were rounded up because they were thought to be disloyal," Dr. Owen Miller of the School of Oriental and African Studies told the BBC. These suspected communist sympathizers were regularly executed, and not always even in an official manner.

Lieutenant Colonel Rollins S. Emmerich eventually explained his orders when it came to these prisoners to military historians, who then whitewashed their own records to keep U.S. hands clean. Emmerich admitted he told South Korean Colonel Kim Chong-won "that if the enemy did arrive to the outskirts of (Busan) he would be permitted to open the gates of the prison and shoot the prisoners with machine guns" (via CBS News). The unedited version of this account was not discovered until decades later.

An ongoing cover-up is still keeping the full truth from coming out. An inquiry into the many U.S. bombings of South Korean refugees that resulted in thousands dead was suddenly handwaved away in 2016, possibly because South Korea was trying to cover up investigations into mass graves of its own civilians, many of them these alleged communist sympathizers, killed by its government during the war.

One of the most bizarre things about the Korean conflict is that the war technically never ended. However, there was an armistice that brought most troops home on all sides in 1953. (As well as South Korean POWs who were not returned, there were 21 U.S. defectors in the Korean War who chose to move to China rather than return to America at the conflict's end.) 

Returning soldiers faced indifference at best and at worst, discrimination. The Korean War is known as "The Forgotten War" in the U.S. for a reason, even the armistice got almost no reaction from the population, certainly nothing comparable to the end of WWII. Reporters who went looking for public reactions in Washington, D.C., and New York City on the day the armistice was announced found that no one really cared.

Meanwhile, returning Chinese troops were shamed for not dying in battle. "I was so happy when we first returned to the country," Chinese veteran of the Korean War Zhang Zeshi told The Japan Times in 2000. "We were welcomed with slogans, flowers, and good food." But this euphoria was very short-lived. Returning soldiers, especially POWs, were seen as failures or traitors and interrogated. "Soon, we had to write a confession," Zhang said. "At the end of the interrogation, I was deprived of my party membership as well as my military status. I was completely shocked! I didn't do anything wrong, so how could I be treated like this?"