The Korean War Was More Brutal Than We Remember

Gregory Peck, Pork Chop Hill

I was seven when the movie Pork Chop Hill starring Gregory Peck was released. I probably saw it on Saturday Night at the Movies a year or two later. At the time, it seemed like a pretty good war movie. It was intense, had characters you could root for, and had heroes. I was too you, though to catch the real message of the film, that men are being asked to put their lives on the line for a meaningless objective.

U.S. howitzer position near the Kum River

There's a sense in which the Korean War is something of a forgotten war. The objectives in World War II seemed clear. The Axis powers had to be stopped. The Korean war was a different kind of war, the beginning of a series of conflicts that had fuzzier rationales.

At the end of World War II my father enlisted in the army and was sent first to the Philippines and then Korea. This was before the Korean conflict escalated to what it became several years later.

Combat in the streets of Seoul.

As I've been reading Don't Know Much About History the past ten days or so, I just finished Ken Davis's section on the Korean War. Last year I learned from Paul Thomas Chamberlin's The Cold War's Killing Fields that Korea was not some innocent escapade. Civilians suffered terribly in that conflict. It's hard to believe that we almost used atomic bombs in that war. In an interview published posthumously General Douglas MacArthur recommended dropping between 30 and 50 atomic bombs on targets across Manchuria. One shudders to consider the implications of this.

While pulling together some research for this blog post I came across another blog post that tied to my thoughts here. The title of this November 15, 2019 story by Darien Cavanaugh is The Korean War Was So Brutal That America's Most Hardened Soldiers Were Shaken.

Cavanaugh wrote, "On a per-capita basis, the Korean War was one of the deadliest wars in modern history, especially for the civilian population of North Korea. The scale of the devastation shocked and disgusted the American military personnel who witnessed it, including some who had fought in the most horrific battles of World War II."

It was Chamberlin's book that brought my attention to what Cavanaugh went on to say.

B-29 Superfortress

"Several factors contributed to the high casualty ratios. The Korean Peninsula is densely populated. Rapidly shifting front lines often left civilians trapped in combat zones. Both sides committed numerous massacres and carried out mass executions of political prisoners. Modern aircraft carried out a vast bombing campaign, dropping massive loads of napalm along with standard bombs."

The U.S. dropped 20% more bombs on North Korea than were dropped in the Pacific during the entire World War II. In addition we dropped over 32,000 tons of napalm, which has to be one of the most inhuman weapons ever conceived by humans.

By the war's end North Korea lost ten percent of its population, chiefly due to this scorched earth bombing campaign.

But the worst of this conflict was what Paul Thomas Chamberlin draws attention to in his book, which is a devastating indictment of our post WWII behavior in the various theaters beginning with Korea. This is what we never heard about before, that we openly massacred civilians. Writes Cavanaugh:

It wasn’t until 1999 that the United States acknowledged—after a lengthy investigation by the Associated Press—that a 1950 letter from U.S. Ambassador John J. Muccio authorized commanders in the field to adopt a policy of openly massacring civilians.

USS Missouri firing 16-inch guns.

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Related Links
Interview with Paul Thomas Chamberlin, author of The Cold War's Killing Fields
Photo of Gregory Peck, source: imdb.com
All other photos on page: GoodFreePhotos.com
If you're a blogger looking for Free Historical Photos, here is a website you may wish to consider bookmarking:
https://www.goodfreephotos.com/historical-battles/korean-war/column-of-the-us-1st-marine-division-move-through-chinese-lines-battle-of-chosin-reservoir.jpg.php

Author Historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin Shares Insights from His Research on The Cold War's Killing Fields

Just over a year ago I discovered an audio version of Paul Thomas Chamberlin's well-researched and thoroughly engaging The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace in our local library. I listen to books while commuting, and from the getgo it was a compelling read. I was soon writing about it and ordered a copy of the hardback for ongoing research purposes.

Ideas from this book have helped serve as a lens to better appreciate a number of other books I've read this past year including Seymour Hersh's books and Ken Burns' Vietnam, among others. I consider Chamberlin's book important for any Baby Boomer who has grown up in this period of history as it helps us understand many of the events that formed a backdrop for our own personal histories from McCarthyism to the Space Race to the Concert for Bangladesh and the ongoing Middle East turmoil.

Paul Chamberlin is currently Associate Professor of History at Columbia University. He taught for six years at the University of Kentucky after receiving his PhD from Ohio State University. He previously studied at the American University of Cairo and the University of Damascus and has held fellowships at Yale University and Williams College.

I recently reached out to the author as a means of learning more about this work and an excuse to keep talking about the so more people will read it.

EN: What was your motivation for writing The Cold War’s Killing Fields?

Photo by Ross Yelsey

Paul Thomas Chamberlin: There was a general consensus among historians that post-1945 era conflicts took place in the so-called Third World. Nevertheless, it struck me that we didn't have a clear idea of where, when, or how -- precisely -- these conflicts happened. The discussion was all generalities and few specifics aside from disconnected wars such as Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. I wanted to create a narrative map that would give a sense of shape to the heretofore shapeless violence of the Cold War age. In doing so, the book also suggests a new periodization to the post-1945 era and tries to suggest a sense of proportion to the era's global patterns of violence.

EN: One of the key takeaways for me was that the so-called Cold War took place in the context of the post-Colonial era. That is, the World Wars 1 & 2 liberated the rest of the world’s peoples from the Colonial powers. How did this “revelation” become so clear for you? And why is it still not grasped?

PTC: Historians in my field are fairly accustomed to thinking about 1945 as a major transition in international affairs from a world of empires and colonies to a world of nation-states. Likewise, we often approach the Cold War in the context of decolonization. What I found in the course of my research, however, was that most of the era's largest conflicts were not wars for decolonization -- i.e. conflicts aimed at pushing out colonial powers. Indeed, most of the bloodiest wars took place inside postcolonial societies that had already driven out their colonizers. These battles, then, were struggles for control of postcolonial states. My sense is that, in general, most readers and diplomatic historians don't always differentiate between decolonization and postcoloniality. Beyond this, Eurocentrism and Americentrism still tend to direct a lot of folks' away from the wider world.

EN: I would like to have seen you apply this truth/reality in more depth to South American power struggles of the 50s to 80s. Are you working on a follow up on that topic?

PTC: Not at the moment, I'm currently working on a project that looks at the Second World War as a clash between competing imperial powers. The Latin American case is interesting, but I found that it didn't quite fit into the story I was trying to tell. On the one hand, the casualty figures just weren't there in Latin America. Though the region certainly saw more than its fair share of vicious wars, the body counts of the conflicts in Asia and the Middle East dwarfed those in Latin America. Moreover, the sort of conflicts that Latin America experienced as well as U.S. interventions in the region began long before 1945. As Latin American historians have argued, then, the conflicts taking place there weren't really Cold War phenomena. Rather, they relate to a deeper history stretching back to the early 20th century and even the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. For more on this, it's worth looking at Greg Grandin, Stephen Rabe, and Alan McPherson's work.

M26 Pershing tanks in downtown Seoul, Korea

EN: The great tragedy, as you point out repeatedly, is how damaging all this has been to the innocent civilians who are just trying to go about their business and survive. Why are our leaders so oblivious to the suffering they generate?

PTC: Nationalism teaches us to see the world as broken up into separate, national boxes. Leaders and the people they represent tend to care more about the deaths of their fellow countrymen and women than the deaths of foreigners. My guess is that this will remain the case so long as we remain unable to see ourselves as global citizens. The big challenge moving forward in this regard seems to be climate change. How do we put our common interests as humans above our narrow interests as Americans, Chinese, Russians, etc.? Unfortunately for the time being, it seems our narrow national consciousness maintains a pretty strong grip.

EN: How do American citizens properly process all this bad behavior by its own leaders?

PTC: I think it's helpful to gain a better sense of history. It's been my impression that officials have historically tended to act in good faith but their priorities were often rooted in short term interests and unfounded anxieties. This was certainly the case during the Cold War when exaggerated fears of the Soviet Union led the United States to militarize the Cold War and stage disastrous interventions in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. But fear and short-term thinking are powerful forces -- I'm not sure how we can move past them.

EN: Who are some of the people whose voices you respect today?

PTC: That's tough, there are so many. I think Timothy Snyder has had some interesting things to say in the last few years about our current situation. I'll also listen to Rachel Maddow’s show when I have some time to check in on current American politics (albeit with a strong editorial take). I think Shoshona Zuboff's Age of Surveillance Capitalism puts forward some interesting ideas.

EN: Can you recommend 2 or 3 books for further reading?

PTC: Off the top of my head, Odd Arne Westad's Global Cold War and The Cold War: A World History cover some similar themes as my own book. Daniel Immerwahr's How to Hide An Empire is another really interesting take on U.S. global power. Another book I'm looking forward to reading is Megan Black's Global Interior which looks at the Department of the Interior as a paradoxical agent of American expansionism and globalism.

EndNote: Thank you, Paul. I believe you've made an important contribution toward better understanding our history.

Related Links
Killing Fields: New Book Proposes that the Cold War Wasn't Really Cold, It Was Just Different
The Thích Quảng Đức Episode (A Snapshot from The Cold War's Killing Fields)
The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, Revisited
The Cold War's Killing Fields at Amazon
Korean War photo via Good Free Photos

The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, Revisited

"Falsehood is a recognized and extremely useful weapon in warfare, and every country uses it quite deliberately to deceive its own people, to attract neutrals, and to mislead the enemy. The ignorant and innocent masses in each country are unaware at the time that they are being misled, and when it is all over only here and there are the falsehoods discovered and exposed. As it is all past history and the desired effect has been produced by the stories and statements, no one troubles to investigate the facts and establish the truth."
--Introduction to Arthur Ponsonby's Falsehood in Wartime

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If reading about the lies and misdeeds of one's own government gives you indigestion, then that is good. It ought to. As Arthur Ponsonby notes, without lies there would be “no reason and no will for war.”

Anne Morelli has summarized and systematized the contents of Ponsonby's classic in "ten commandments of propaganda."

1. We do not want war.   (Both Woodrow Wilson and FDR ran on this platform promise.)
2. The opposite party alone is guilty of war.
3. The enemy is the face of the devil.
4. We defend a noble cause, not our own interest. (Just War Theory)
5. The enemy systematically commits cruelties; our mishaps are involuntary. (My Lai)
6. The enemy uses forbidden weapons.
7. We suffer small losses, those of the enemy are enormous. (Viet Nam War reporting.)
8. Artists and intellectuals back our cause. (Hmmm)
9. Our cause is sacred. (Domino Theory)
10. All who doubt our propaganda are traitors. (Antiwar protesters)

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Lying, of course, doesn't just happen in wartime, and that governments or people lie should not surprise us. What is extraordinary, he says, is our "amazing readiness to believe. It is, indeed, because of human credulity that lies flourish."

Against this backdrop we visit the Gulf of Tonkin incident, as detailed in Paul Thomas Chamberlin's The Cold War's Killing Fields.

The significance of the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964 is this: As a result of two attacks on the USS Maddox by North Vietnamese torpedo boats, Lyndon Johnson successfully obtained unanimous approval from Congress and 88-2 in the Senate to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which gave our country the right to take "all necessary measures" to repel the enemy and "prevent further aggression."

BUT... What really happened?

First, it was not reported anywhere that the U.S. had been assisting South Vietnamese commandoes who were conducting raids on North Vietnamese installations. These raids were controlled by and sustained by the U.S. Navy, "attacking targets selected by the CIA in an operation paid for by the United States."

Second, and more significantly, the second attack on the Maddox never happened. We made it up.

So LBJ announces that these two assaults (the second fabricated and completely fictitious) on our ship were unprovoked. Johnson now had his pretext for retaliation against Hanoi, "an action U.S. officials had been discussing for some time." We soon ramped up the bombing campaigns and in three and a half years dropped 643,000 tons of bombs as part of what was named Rolling Thunder.

The outcome of these two incidents was the passage by Congress of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted President Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to assist any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by "communist aggression". The resolution served as Johnson's legal justification for deploying U.S. conventional forces and the commencement of open warfare against North Vietnam.

So, North Vietnam fired a couple torpedos at us, and in return we destroyed 65 percent of their petroleum facilities, 60 percent of their bridges, 9.821 vehicles, and 2000 rail cars. According to Chamberlin, for every dollar of damage inflicted we spent $6.60. 1,000 Americans were killed or captured.

Rolling Thunder did nothing to stop infiltration by North Vietnamese into South Vietnam. It did give justification for Moscow and Beijing to increase their aid to Hanoi.

The saddest part of all this is the "collateral damage," a euphemism for the killing of civilians, 52,000 in this campaign.

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CLOSING THOUGHTS
Is the U.S. the only country that has ever behaved this way? Hardly. Bullies have always found a pretext for getting what they want. The Soviet Union used the Orzel incident to take over Estonia. During the American Civil War 7 French soldiers were killed on the beach at Vera Cruz, so France took over Mexico and installed Austrian monarch Maximillian as Emperor to run the country (till he was shot and the Europeans expelled a couple years later.)

Don't you just love the way bullies make excuses for their actions? "Might makes right," they say.

The Thích Quảng Đức Episode (A Snapshot from The Cold War's Killing Fields)

In October I read Paul Thomas Chamberlin's The Cold War Killing Fields, which I wrote about here. During the time I was reading it I repeatedly indicated to people that it was one of the saddest books I've ever read. The sadness came from two sources. First, because of the quantity of human suffering that has occurred over the course of my lifetime since World War II. And second, my own grief over the role the U.S. has played in contributing to civilian suffering in so many places and in so many ways.

The power of the book comes from the author's efforts to bring context to the manifold stories which may have made national news but which were presented without our real understanding. Many stories show how the U.S. government deliberately twisted the facts in order to achieve its own ends. Eventually, as in the case of the Viet Nam War, the public no matter trusted its government's interpretations and spin.

It's my hope to produce a series of blog posts highlighting several examples from our recent history so that we understand more clearly why there are such divergent views and attitudes about who we are as a nation.

The story of Thích Quảng Đức begins on page 201 in Chamberlin's book. It produced one of the most memorable images from the conflict in Southeast Asia, a Buddhist monk self-immolating. What was less clear to most Americans was the reason this man burned himself to death in the middle of a busy intersection.

Quảng Đức was protesting the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government led by Ngô Đình Diệm. Viet Nam was between 70 and 90% Buddhist, but the U.S. backed President Diem was Catholic. The sacrificial death aimed to draw attention to the persecution and policies of the Diem government.

Malcolm Browne of the Associated Press won a Pulitzer Prize for the photo. Browne and David Halberstam of the New York Times were present because the day before someone notified the press corps in Saigon that "something important" was going to happen outside the Cambodian Embassy the following morning. Most of the reporters ignored this information,

The incident sparked protests throughout the country. In response President Diem declared martial law and claimed the protests were stoked by the National Liberation Front (NLF). The First Lady remarked that she "would clap hands at seeing another monk barbecue show."

John Kennedy and his administration were at odds as to how to respond to these events. Diem had to go but would the next puppet president be any better? Ultimately our government solved the problem by supporting a coup that began on November 1 with U.S. government approval and on November 2 Diem, having surrendered, was shot inside an armored vehicle while being taken into custody. 20 days later the U.S. president would likewise be on the receiving end of a bullet in the head.

* * * * 

The incident that triggered this unraveling of the Diem government took place on June 11. On June 12 another significant event occurred. NAACP leader and civil rights activist Medgar Evers, was shot from behind and killed as he walked toward his home in Mississippi after a long day's work. The incident was one of many that strengthened the resolve of civil rights leaders across the country and especially throughout the Jim Crow South.

Two powerful songs were written in response to this cold-blooded murder, Nina Simone's Missisippi Goddam and Bob Dylan's Only a Pawn in Their Game, which he sang later that summer at the Washington D.C. March for Civil Rights, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., August 28, 1963. 

* * * * 

Grief is a process that though hard to go through is intended to result in acceptance and measure of healing or inner resolution. Those stages are (1) denial, (2) anger, (3) bargaining, (4) depression, and (5) acceptance. What I have learned over the course of a lifetime is that the grieving process takes time, sometimes years and sometimes decades.

Is it possible that moving from innocence to maturity is a process similar to grief in which we have to come to terms with lost innocence. We know the Peter Pan Syndrome is about boys who won't grow up. Is it possible that we have over-believed in the goodness of our government, America the Beautiful, beacon of light to the world?

Marvin Gaye nailed it when he sang, "What's Goin' On?" in 1970.  And the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes seems to have had all this in mind when he wrote,

"For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; 

 the more knowledge, the more grief." (Eccles. 1:18)

TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS STORY 

1. Chamberlin's book provides context to help us understand many of the news stories we heard about or observed during our lifetimes.

2. Events of 1963 became a critical turning point in both the war in Southeast Asia and in the Civil Rights movement in America.

3. American power has not always been used benevolently or wisely. The attempt to help people gain a more realistic picture of our nation and its abuses of power should not be taken to be akin to "hate America first." There are reasons people distrust power. We need to understand where people are coming from in order to be bridge-builders instead of wall-builders.

Related Links
My initial review of  The Cold War's Killing Fields
Everything Is Broken
The 1971 Concert for Bangladesh