The Korean War; 'a Horror that I Cannot Express in Words'

"I shrink - I shrink with a horror that I cannot express in words. The war in Korea has already almost destroyed that nation of 20,000,000 people. I have never seen such devastation. I have seen, I guess, as much blood and disaster as any living man, and it just curdled my stomach the last time I was there. After I looked at the wreckage and those thousands of women and children and everything, I vomited… if you go on indefinitely, you are perpetuating a slaughter such as I have never heard of in the history of mankind."

- General MacArthur to the Senate's Committee on Armed Services and Committee on Foreign Relations 

The Korean war has often been called a ‘proxy’ war between America and the capitalist West, and communist China and North Korea, the first of the Cold War period. The conflict was instigated by North Korean troops of the North Korean Peoples’ Army crossing the 38^th parallel into The Republic of Korea on 25 June 1950. The invasion was rapid and effective, reaching the outskirts of Pusan in the South. The counter-attack by UN troops was similarly effective and rapid, advancing into the North by mid-April 1951. China’s intervention, partly as a result of the gradual encroachment of the UN forces towards the Chinese border, resulted in an eventual stalemate in 1951 with talks continuing until 1953. In July 1953 the armistice was formalised with a switch of prisoners of war, the establishment of a demilitarised zone, as well as a UN commission to monitor said armistice.

Ban Ki-moon, a South Korean politician, and former eighth Secretary-General of the United Nations, reflected on the devastating impact of the Korean War; ‘When I was six, the Korean War broke out, and all the classrooms were destroyed by war. We studied under the trees or in whatever buildings were left… as a child growing up during the Korean War, I knew poverty.’ By the cessation of hostilities in 1953, the war having never been formally concluded, 10% of the Korean population were dead or missing, for lack of official statistics from the DPRK, parallels have been drawn between the proportion of Soviet citizens killed during the years of the second world war. Particularly destructive to the Korean civilian population were the United Nations and U.S. Air Force tactics of blanket bombing North Korean cities; 635 000 tons of bombs were dropped on Korea as well as 32,557 tonnes of napalm. At the same time, almost 40,000 Americans died in action in Korea, with approximately 100,000 injured, and 920 000 Chinese soldiers were killed or wounded during the war.

The border between the North and South was drawn at the 38th parallel in 1945, dividing the Korean peninsula roughly in half, bearing no cultural or historical significance.

The Korean war is referred to in North Korea as the ‘Victorious Fatherland Liberation War’, yet neither ideology won out in the proxy war. In the face of the stark human cost of the Korean War little appears to have been changed; the border remained at the 38^th parallel and North Korea remained communist and closely allied to China, while South Korea remained capitalist and closely allied to the West and the United States in particular. Yet while South Korea’s economy boomed, North Korea fell behind. Furthermore, America became an even stronger presence in South Korea. Currently 23,468 American troops are stationed in South Korea, cementing America’s role in South-North Korean interactions. One would only have to recall the events in 2017 to see how invested America is in potential North Korean militarisation, when North Korean missile testing set off a diplomatic conflict between America and North Korea, inspiring the infamous ‘rocket man’ insult levelled against Kim Jong Un. The Korean War is sometimes referred to in the West as the ‘forgotten war’. There is a sense of shame associated with the war. War atrocities were carried out on both sides and the Americans did not achieve a clear victory, but rather had to come to terms with a smaller nation. Yet the war functioned as a turning point in America’s presence in South Korea. The ‘forgotten war’ deserves remembrance in the face of the lasting human cost and misery caused by the violence, and the consequences of the split, both during the conflict and to this day.

Written by Bozena Fanner