An ''Unnecessary'' War

AN

UNNECESSARY

WAR

Marshall William McMurran

Copyright © 2008 by Marshall William McMurran.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date:  07/09/2021

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Contents

Chapter 1    Surprise, Surprise

Chapter 2    Advance to Retreat

Chapter 3    A Brand-New Enemy

Chapter 4    Seesaw

Chapter 5    The Long Bloody Stalemate (10 July 1951-June 1952)

Chapter 6    The War Grinds to an Uneasy Halt

To

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Foreword

B y June 1950, the US Army had shrunk to one-fourteenth of its World War II maximum strength (from 8.27 million to 541,000 active members). It took the shock of the Korean reality to reverse this rapid dismemberment of the US military. This massive catch-back-defense-related spending added some $260 billion of yearly military-related dollars to the baseline 1950 budget of $141 billion. This money, and that of the following years, triggered continuous innovations in technology lasting through the twentieth century. While the bulk of the US development was later funded by cold-war dollars, the Korean buildup paid for the maturing of the digital computer and the development of seminal weaponry. Weapons development of the post-Korean era moved into the exotic, driven by increasing reliance on far-reaching guided missiles intended to destroy any enemy on earth with their nuclear ordnance. The digital computer would naturally become an integral part of the guidance and control of these complex and often-touchy vehicles.

Introduction

T he story of the Korean War is more than a twice-told tale. By far, the best narrative of the ground war in Korea is due to Clay Blair and is entitled T he Forgotten War . Clay concentrated on ground actions and biographies of military leaders. The role of the USAF in the war was beyond the scope of his book, save noting major air force actions in support of ground forces. The official air force history of the war was, and is, a bit of an embarrassment. In the US Air Force in Korea, the air force historians were typically defensive, often in the extreme. They also stretched truth a bit, not surprisingly in favor of the USAF. Many good authors have written a myriad of good books about this war, depicting actions of specific units or people, or specific times. Only a very few have dealt with the war embedded in the passing parade of our history.

At any rate, on with a tale of Korean unpleasantness played out on a cold war canvass.

The troopship General M.M. Patrick with its grey hull paint scarred from tussles with the navy dock at Adak finally returned some ten thousand of us to Seattle after the Korean armistice. Laced among the returnees were a number of repatriated POWs. For shame, the response of the country to the return of those men who had given so much would be polite disinterest, superimposed on a bit of relief. These ex-prisoners were real heroes. Granted, the Korean War ended with a truce and a whimper instead of a glorious and decisive victory, but right or wrong, the people who fought and died there did what their government told them to do, and they did it bravely. Their blood stopped Communism in Korea in its tracks.

Peace had finally come in July of 1953 after terrible loss of life on both sides, very near where it all began. Sadly, the Korean War was replete with examples of poor American leadership by both political and military leaders. The more egregious command failures were investigated by the US Congress, but were soon swept under the political rug in the interest of politics and national unity.

In 1950, US intelligence in the Far East was poor to nonexistent. The OSS was no more, and the CIA was not yet organized. (Some question that it is even now.) Military intelligence was fragmented. The players were unsure of their roles. The air force had split from the army less than three years before and was by no means ready to act as an effective separate service. The Tactical Air Command that had been supremely effective in supporting the ground forces in the latter stages of WW II had been relegated to near obscurity in 1948 in favor of the glamorous Strategic Air Command of the big nuclear-armed bombers, but SAC was to play no role in Korea, save supplying some airplanes to Far East Command.

Prior to the North Korean onslaught, neither the Joint Chiefs of Staff nor General Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander of Far East, had much interest in Korea. The US Army’s presence on the Korean peninsula on 25 June was down to far fewer people than were on shift that day at the Los Angeles Police Department. General Walton Johnnie Walker, commanding the Eighth Army in Japan, was utterly unprepared for the job ahead of him, as was virtually all of the US Far East military. The US troops, thrown in the way of the North Koreans, were often new draftees with little training. These men were in Japan to provide an American presence while occupying a defeated and now peaceful island nation. Most were in no way prepared for their coming dismal fate in Korea.

Chapter 1

Surprise, Surprise

Korea, Land of the Morning Calm (25 June 1950)

T he North Koreans, like the Japanese on 7 December 1941, struck very early on that Sunday morning without warning. The first onslaught from the North came out of the morning fog when units of the North Korean People’s Army, the NKPA, struck the remote coastal town of Ongjin located on a muddy arm of the Haeju Peninsula in extreme western Korea. Ongjin town is just south of the thirty-eighth parallel but cutoff from the rest of South Korea by the Yellow Sea. At 0330 hours on 25 June, artillery and mortar shells rained down on the Republic of Korea (ROK) border guards. The ROKs soon heard the creaks and clanks of metal treads, saw the muzzle flashes, and smelled the oily smoke from V12 diesel engines. Several ROKs immediately fell from bursts of direct machine-gun fire or 85-mm shells exploding nearby. Attacking NKPA forces quickly overwhelmed the officers and men of the South Korean 17 th Infantry Regiment. ¹ Koreans were invading Korea! The ROK 17th Infantry had no rational choice but to execute their preplanned evacuation of the indefensible cutoff sector, leaving western Haeju to the North.

A series of well-planned, well-supported NKPA attacks rapidly rippled eastward along the demilitarized zone, first to Kaesong, then through Chunchon, and on to the east coast. The North Korean thrusts easily overran the weak South Korean defensive positions near Chorwan. The invaders poured across the empty zone straddling the thirty-eight parallel, concentrating their thrusts southward along the Uijongbu road.

SEOUL 1952, THE BOMB MARKS THE

LOCATION OF THE FIRST BOMB DROPPED BY THE

NORTH ON THE SOUTH (PHOTO BY AUTHOR)

North Koreans earlier had quietly rerouted rail tracks near Seoul to facilitate the movement of their troops and materiel south. While the only US officer on the thirty-eight parallel that morning, a Lieutenant Darrigo, watched a North Korea regiment detraining from a ghost train at Kaesong that should have never been there. As soon as the North Korean infantry spotted the American, they opened fire. Lieutenant Darrigo ran, fired up his jeep, and sped southward, like Paul Revere, spreading the alarm.

Come dawn, the North Korean Air Force was marauding as well. Some one hundred planes bombed central Seoul killing a number of unsuspecting and innocent civilians. After the bombs were expended, the attackers swept down, strafing both Seoul and Kimpo Air Bases. Shortly afterward, NKPA Infantry columns, spearheaded by the Russian-built T-34 tanks, easily broke through hastily formed defensive lines thrown up by the lightly armed ROK Army at Kaesong. The T-34s crunching the ROK defenses that day were recent improvements on Soviet tanks that had led the Russian advance into Germany during WW II. T-34s were probably the best all-around tanks of that war and possibly any war.² By US design, the ROKs had no artillery or supporting armor, but they didn’t lack bravery that day. The ROKs threw their lives away, futilely attacking marauding T-34s with small bazookas, light machine guns, satchel charges, and rifles. In spite of ROK heroic and determined defenses, North Korean tanks and infantry raced south as if the ROK Army didn’t exist. The few US Army advisors of the KMAG (Korean Military Advisory Group) in South Korea prudently avoided engaging the North Korean juggernaut. The US military mission had been to train, advice, and observe. The advisors observed, retreated, and reported.

For several days after the North Korean invasion, there was no coherent US Army presence in Korea. US Air Force missions were limited to air evacuations of civilians or flying cover of sorts for the streams of evacuees fleeing south. Nevertheless, the first air-to-air kills of the war were in the early afternoon of 27 June when F-82s³ of the 68th and 332nd USAF squadrons bounced five Yak fighters heading for Kimpo Air Base near Seoul (K-14).⁴ The F-82s quickly shot the three Yaks out of the sky. The F-82s went unscathed. The first USAF jet fighter victories occurred a bit later on the same day. This time, the North Koreans had sent eight propeller-driven Ilyushin IL-10 fighters to attack American transport aircraft on the ground at Kimpo. The unfortunate Northerners ran into four Lockheed F-80C jet fighters. The Shooting Stars rather easily shot down four of the IL-10s. The others prudently fled.

P51 and Xf-82 experimental all

-weather fighter (USAF Museum Photo)

Shock came to Washington with the invasion news. The first word came via United Press wire early on Saturday evening. (Washington daylight saving time is thirteen hours earlier than Seoul time.) President Truman first heard of the NKPA invasion at his home in Independence, Missouri. He thundered out, By God! I’m going to let them have it! But what with? In spite of the Truman ire, the US Far East military establishment under the direction of General of the Armies, Douglas MacArthur, was abjectly unprepared for any war. MacArthur’s brief was the occupation of Japan, and it was going very well, thank you. MacArthur’s most important Korean-related action had been to vet and choose the South Korean president, one Syngman Rhee (or Rhee Syngman). With that deed done, MacArthur went back to running Japan as a virtual god.

The Seeds of War

Syngman Rhee was a dyed-in-the-wool martinet and an exceedingly unpopular Korean president. Prior to returning home in October of 1945, Mr. Syngman had lived in exile in the United States for some forty years. Once Korea was free from Japanese rule, he returned to Korea at General MacArthur’s request, even though the US State Department refused to issue him an exit visa. Some reports still claim that Rhee had served briefly in the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) beginning in 1944 as a nominal colonel, but there is no official confirmation of Rhee’s service with any US intelligence service. Perhaps a MacArthur ruse of listing him as Colonel Rhee on a military flight manifest gave rise to the legend. While Rhee was heading up the provisional Korean government in exile, he apparently identified a number of anti-Japanese Korean groups for the OSS. (That might have also been the source of the OSS connection.)

Rhee’s principal claims to the Korean presidential job were based on positive Chiang Kai-shek recommendations to MacArthur. It didn’t hurt that Rhee was a devout Christian and an unswerving anticommunist. MacArthur chose Mr. Syngman in spite of his age, his often-dismal relations with his Korean colleagues, and his well-deserved reputation for dishonesty. When Rhee was elected president of the first Korean republic in 1948, he was well along in years, at least seventy-three years old. Born in 1875 (some say ’76), Rhee was US educated. He took a BA at George Washington University, an MA at Harvard University, and a PhD at Princeton University (with difficulty). He had been associated with Korean governments in exile since 1919. But along the way, Rhee had gone through at least one bad patch of unchristian behavior. He had been expelled from the Korean Provisional Government in 1925 for embezzlement.⁵ Rhee’s faults were many. He was never a man of introspection, compromise, or negotiation.

The United States had accepted Soviet Russia during WW II, as an ally of sorts. The Soviets were Communists, to be sure, and United States administrations had always viewed Communism with a mixture of bemusement, fear, and occasional terror. However, the Soviets had fought bravely against the common Axis enemy and suffered massive losses doing so. Nevertheless, fearing the real possibility of Soviet attempts at Korean partition after WW II, Great Britain, China, and the United States went out of their way to guarantee the independence of the whole of Korea at the Cairo Conference of 1943.

When the Soviets later suggested that Korea be partitioned temporarily along the thirty-eighth parallel, the world’s diplomats were taken by surprise. These same diplomats were further amazed when the United States quickly acquiesced.⁶ The gist of that US Soviet agreement was that the Soviets would occupy Korea north of the thirty-eight parallel by the end of August of 1945. The United States would occupy the southern part of the peninsula a month later. Both occupying forces were ostensibly there to restore and maintain order and to accept the surrender of Japanese forces still in Korea. The agreement also provided that once order prevailed on the peninsula, free elections would be held and Korea reunited. So much for agreements.

During the Moscow Conference of 27 December 1945, both the Soviet Union and the United States reemphasized their joint expectation of a unified Korea. A four-power trusteeship was contemplated as an interim measure for five years, or until a stable Korean government could be formed. Instead, continual squabbles arose among all parties, concerning candidates, platforms, and government styles. The considered position of the United States was then, and still is, that the failure of the unification process was the fault of Soviet meddling. Not surprisingly, the Soviets blame the failure on the United States’ intractable support of Syngman Rhee, that prickly far-right politician. US support of Syngman Rhee while annoying to the Soviets, should not have been an insurmountable stumbling block to a mutually supported government. A somewhat more plausible explanation offered by US administrators at the time, was that the Soviets seemed to fear that the majority of Koreans might reject a hard-line communist government out of hand. In truth, the Soviets were probably just dragging their feet, waiting, and stirring the pot, to see what developed. From the Soviet viewpoint, the tactic worked well for a time.

Prior to the Boxer rebellion of 1900, Korea was a semiautonomous nation within the Chinese sphere. The Chinese generally mistrusted Koreans and rarely, if ever, considered them as allies. After the western power consortium broke the back of the Boxer uprising, a Russian-French task group moved into Korea from Manchuria infuriating the Meiji Japanese who had their own designs on Korea as a stepping-stone in their planned expansion westward. The Japanese would get their revenge a few years later with a series of convincing defeats of Russian forces, principally the destruction of the Russian Far East fleet at the straits of Tsushima. The Russo-Japanese conflict ended with the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 brokered by Theodore Roosevelt. The words of that treaty rather arrogantly placed Korea (Chosen) in the Japanese sphere of influence and gave legitimacy to the subsequent Japanese occupation. By 1910, the entire Korean peninsula was under a brutal Japanese rule. Korea wasn’t Korea under the Japanese. It was Chosen.⁷

When the United States occupied South Korea after the 1945 Japanese defeat, the US military government allowed no material Korean participation in the governing of their country. US occupiers made a number of mistakes that were to be repeated in Iraq some sixty years later. American martial law was harsh, sometimes brutal. The US Army controlled Korea south of the thirty-eighth parallel from August of 1945 until 1948 with the prime mission of suppressing Communist dissidents and a secondary mission of keeping civil order.⁸ Only after the Communists established the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the north on 9 September 1948 under Soviet guidance did the American military sponsor a counterfoil Korean Democratic Party later in the same month.

kim il-sung and number one son kim jong-il

The authoritarian US military government had its hands and belly full with people’s committees from the very start of the postwar occupation. The same Communist committees that had resisted the Japanese occupation became powerful elements in Korean politics after WW II in both North and South. Communist blocs quickly formed from these resistance groups and actively opposed the US military government in South Korea. Attempts by the United States to subdue the committee activities led to a widespread, but spotty rebellion beginning in October 1946. Japanese-trained Korean National Police and US occupation forces finally suppressed the piecemeal insurrection, but background dissention continued essentially unabated. American use of the heavy-handed Korean National Police proved to be a serious error. The Korean people hated the cruel and often sadistic police, and for good reason. The Korean common folk also resented the overt American support of wealthy industrialists and landowners that most Koreans believed had been far too cozy with their Japanese occupiers. It’s sad, but true that the Communists had provided the only meaningful resistance to the thirty-five-year Japanese occupation. The Red factions now wanted their share of a liberated Korea.

Kim Il-sung (Great Leader) was without a doubt the architect of the 25 June invasion. (Like Syngman Rhee, in keeping with Oriental naming style, he should probably be thought of as Mr. Kim, the family name coming first.) Mr. Kim was born 15 April 1912 in Pyongyang Province. Originally named Kim Song Ju, he was the oldest of three sons. His father was a Christian. It appears that Mr. Kim attended Christian church services for most of his formative years. Because of the cruel Japanese occupation of Korea, the Kim family escaped to Manchuria in 1919 when Kim was seven. Kim surfaced some ten years later in October of 1929, when he was jailed for his association with a Manchurian Communist student group. After his release from prison, Kim joined the Manchurian Anti-Japanese United Army. By 1932, he had become a respected unit leader. His men proved to be extremely effective against the Japanese. So much so that the Japanese army formed a special team to track Kim down. The Japanese team failed. Around 1936, Kim officially adopted the name of Kim Il-sung, probably in honor of his uncle who had been involved in the ill-fated 1919 Korean uprising against the Japanese.

Things turned very sour for Kim in 1940 when the Japanese captured and killed his wife. By 1941, the Japanese were hot on his trail hounding him into Siberia where he and several comrades encouraged by the Soviets, joined the 88th Special Independent Guerilla Brigade of the Soviet Army. The Soviets rather rapidly recognized Kim’s leadership skills and ultimately promoted him to the rank of battalion commander. After the Japanese surrender to the Allies, Kim, by then an experienced resistance leader, sailed home. In September of 1945, he arrived at the port of Pyongyang aboard the Soviet warship Pukachef. He was no doubt well armed by then, with a Soviet-approved brief of political conduct. When the Soviets sponsored the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, they chose Kim Il-sung and Kim Tubong⁹ as leaders. Somewhat later, the Soviets picked Kim Il-sung as the man to form a provisional government, the People’s Committee of North Korea. In 1948, Kim was sort of elected head of state, chairman of the central committee and leader of most everything else. He cemented his power well with the usual purges of real and imagined opponents. It would be difficult to find two more arrogant, dictatorial, and abrasive personalities confronting each other on the world stage than Mr. Kim and Mr. Syngman.

Meanwhile, in Washington, the Truman administration was wrestling with a continuing self-inflicted budget problem. Marshall Plan expenditures, questionable in the minds of many congressmen, had forced the Truman budget people to look to the dwindling US military establishment to wring an added measure of budget-balancing money. To save a few shekels, President Truman decided in March of 1948 to revise US Korean policy and permit the full withdrawal of US forces from Korea. In effect, he told the United Nations that from then on, it would be up to them to handle any Korean problem that might crop up. At the same time, a Joint Chiefs of Staff study supporting the withdrawal pronounced that Korea was of little strategic value to the United States. The JCS report went on to point out that any commitment of US military forces in Korea would be ill advised. Finally, the study noted that the UN might consider